[FPSPACE] [Fwd: One of the beautiful photos yet from Cassini]

[David Woods]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	One of the beautiful photos yet from Cassini
Date: 	Tue, 30 Nov 2004 12:50:57 -0500
From: 	LARRY KLAES <ljk4 at msn.com>
To: 	David Woods <drwoods1 at earthlink.net>



http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA06142
 

    In a splendid portrait created by light and gravity, Saturn's lonely
    moon Mimas is seen against the cool, blue-streaked backdrop of
    Saturn's northern hemisphere. Delicate shadows cast by the rings arc
    gracefully across the planet, fading into darkness on Saturn's night
    side.

    The part of the atmosphere seen here appears darker and more bluish
    than the warm brown and gold hues seen in Cassini images of the
    southern hemisphere, due to preferential scattering of blue
    wavelengths by the cloud-free upper atmosphere.

    The bright blue swath near Mimas (398 kilometers, or 247 miles
    across) is created by sunlight passing through the Cassini division
    (4,800 kilometers, or 2,980 miles wide). The rightmost part of this
    distinctive feature is slightly overexposed and therefore bright
    white in this image. Shadows of several thin ringlets within the
    division can be seen here as well. The dark band that stretches
    across the center of the image is the shadow of Saturn's B ring, the
    densest of the main rings. Part of the actual Cassini division
    appears at the bottom, along with the A ring and the narrow, outer F
    ring. The A ring is transparent enough that, from this viewing
    angle, the atmosphere and threadlike shadows cast by the inner C
    ring are visible through it.

    Images taken with red, green and blue filters were combined to
    create this color view. The images were obtained with the Cassini
    spacecraft narrow angle camera on Nov. 7, 2004, at a distance of 3.7
    million kilometers (2.3 million miles) from Saturn. The image scale
    is 22 kilometers (14 miles) per pixel.

    The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the
    European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet
    Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of
    Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for
    NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter
    and its two onboard cameras, were designed, developed and assembled
    at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute,
    Boulder, Colo.

    For more information, about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit,
    http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov <http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/> and the
    Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org
    <http://ciclops.org/>.