Spectacular photos of Saturn

Just a link, but better here than in the link forum.

SF Gate: Stunning new images of Saturn released

awesome... i was just going to start a thread about this. here's another link with the full-size pictures:



this photo is a mosaic of 165 images taken with the cassini space craft as the sun was directly behind saturn, lighting up the rings! it's amazing how many tiny details of the rings you can see, color differences and subtle outer rings that are usually really tough to detect!

Amazing pic! For those interested, this article explains that they found missing moons with the Cassini photos:

space.com: Saturn's Shadow Sheds Light on Rings

Wow. I actually found something I like better than my current screensaver-pic. Really something else! Thanks for the links!

Some more impressive images of Saturn:

.

. . .

.

The image at top left was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope; all others are from the Cassini mission. The reddish one shows the north pole of Saturn, and the two lower ones show what appear to be seas on Saturn's moon Titan (Lake Superior on the right for comparison). See these and many more images in NASA's Planetary Photojournal.

Another impressive view of Saturn's rings in today's Astronomy Picture of the Day.

These pictures are truly stunning. Thank you very much for sharing them.

And from a different angle:

Well, it seems that they discovered yet another ring around Saturn. The mother of rings in fact. BBC: Mother of All Rings detected Around Saturn

Yeah, apparently if it were visible to the naked eye, it would have double the width of the full moon! So nice that there is still so much to discover in our own backyard!

Saturn was on The Sky At Night last night. One picture which stood out was of the tiny moon Daphnis, which orbits within the rings (and is IIRC 2 or 3 Km accross). It makes a drag on the ring which send the particles several Km perpendicular and throw a shadow as they catch the sun.

many thanks for the link (+)

Right then ( said in best Jezza voice)

OK, I’m a noob and I know absolutely fook all about this stuff but I love looking at these kind of pictures and wish I had more time to so. It puts me in a frame of mind like when I used to take a lot of drugs and would question everything around me and try and figure out why things were the way they are. Anyway enough about that….

The first thing I thought when saw the pic that IA posted was an artists impression of an event that I saw in the link GreenTea posted.



So would I be correct in thinking that what we are seeing in the pic that IA posted is in some ways the same as in the artists impression but on truly different scale in terms of size and time? or not?

It fascinates the fook out of me by the way so I don’t care if I ask stupid questions

I really don't know the answer to that (I come from a similar angle as you - very interested, not very knowledgeable) but it seems to me that it is the gravity of the moon in the picture you posted interfering with the rings (much as our moon pulls up the seas) but the one I posted is a moon which is inside the ring and is travelling through the dust (which varies in size from a few cm across to a a few hundred metres) and disturbing it like your hand would water or sand and then the gravity of Saturn levels it off before the moon passes again.

Daphnis is very small, so the gravity would affect the smaller particles in the ring, but I think it is just the moons volume which does this rather than it's mass.

As you would say - fooked if I know.

Some of those photos are awesome. It looks huge.