Sunday, February 6, 2011

Smog-enshrouded Titan, Epimetheus and Saturn's A and F rings!

Smog-enshrouded Titan, Epimetheus and Saturn's A and F rings!
Click on the image to enlarge

Cassini delivers this stunning vista showing small, battered Epimetheus and smog-enshrouded Titan, with Saturn's A and F rings stretching across the scene. The color information in the colorized view is completely artificial: it is derived from red, green and blue images taken at nearly the same time and phase angle as the clear filter image. This color information was overlaid onto the previously released clear filter view in order to approximate the scene as it might appear to human eyes. The prominent dark region visible in the A ring is the Encke gap (325 kilometers wide), in which the moon Pan (26 kilometers across) and several narrow ringlets reside. Moon-driven features which score the A ring can easily be seen to the left and right of the Encke gap. A couple of bright clumps can be seen in the F ring. Epimetheus is 116 kilometers across and giant Titan is 5,150 kilometers across. The view was acquired with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 28, 2006, at a distance of approximately 667,000 kilometers from Epimetheus and 1.8 million kilometers from Titan. The image captures the illuminated side of the rings. The image scale is 4 kilometers per pixel on Epimetheus and 11 kilometers per pixel on Titan.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

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