By Rebecca Boyle Posted 06.30.2010 at 10:30 am 4 Comments

Ghostly Encounter NASA's Cassini spacecraft snapped this image of Dione and Titan April 10, 2010. NASA

Check out this latest image from Cassini, NASA’s orbiting Saturn outpost. It shows the small Saturnian moon Dione in crisp detail, in front of the hazy atmosphere of Titan.

Cassini takes pictures like this all the time, so it’s easy to forget how amazing it is: We have a foil-wrapped 22-foot-tall spacecraft whizzing around the rings and moons of the sixth planet, snapping stunning vistas of a place no human will likely ever visit. And each photo is more amazing than the last.

One of my most vivid childhood memories is seeing the rings of Saturn through a telescope for the first time, during a star party at the Denver Museum of Natural History. I had seen pictures, of course, but it blew my mind that I could see the rings with my own eyes, in real time. It somehow gave life to what had previously been an abstract concept, of a distant orb we can barely see on a clear night.

That’s why I love Cassini. Its cameras lend so much texture and realism, even vivacity, to the strange worlds beyond our own.

This image was taken April 10, 2010, in visible color -- no fancy Photoshop work, except a bit of heightened contrast. This is what things really looked like from Cassini’s position, 1.1 million miles from Dione, 1.7 million miles from Titan and at least 744 million miles from Earth. Pretty amazing stuff.

[NASA]

4 Comments

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Xspot
06/30/10 at 9:00 pm

I can't remember, if I ever heard of Dione before. It looks much like our moon, so far away from the sun, so Saturn must have taken care of it, keeping it's crispy and dry leftovers.
Next time they could send little bigger aluminum foil canister and unwrapped it on the moon, with more powerful telescope and sensors, to make it a permanent observatory.
And we haven't seen nothing yet. It would be fantastic to make those post Apollo missions, on every suitable moons in our solar system and receive live video streams directly to an internet and to my screen, connected trough some user interface, like in video games :)
Please, just do it!

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Spacegeek
07/01/10 at 1:59 am

THAT is a cool picture. I am not one that cares too much for black and white art, but the right size of this image in the right frame is going to look absolutely awesome over my fireplace. Can't wait to see the look on my wife's face when she sees I have replaced her beloved picture of George Washington crossing the Delaware with this gem.

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CDales1004
07/01/10 at 10:41 am

"This image was taken April 10, 2010, in visible color "

This is visible color?
I can understand the moon being grayish-white, but Titan?
Last I saw (on http://www.solarviews.com/eng/titan.htm), Titan was orangish in color



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