Cassini's end of year fireworks
Tue Jan 3, 2006 at 12:36 UTC
Cool and icy Dione floats in front of giant Saturn bedecked in a dazzling array of colors...Few sights in the solar system are more strikingly beautiful than softly hued Saturn embraced by the shadows of its stately rings...
Carina Nebula...
With its thick, distended atmosphere, Titan's orange globe shines softly, encircled by a thin halo of purple light-scattering haze...
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
The surface of Dione, which exhibits contrasting bright and dark areas when viewed up close, appears pale in this image. It is Saturn's multi-hued cloud bands that boldly steal the show. Discrete clouds and eddies in Saturn's northern hemisphere can be seen within the faint shadows of the rings on the planet. Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across.
Cassini is in a phase of its mission in which its orbit will be nearly equatorial for some time. This view was obtained from about one-third of a degree out of the ring plane.
Images taken with red, green and blue filters were used to create this natural-color view. The images were obtained with the wide-angle camera on Sept. 22, 2005, from a distance of approximately 803,000 kilometers (499,000 miles) from Dione and at a sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of about 43 degrees. The image scale is about 48 kilometers (30 miles) per pixel.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
The gas planet's subtle northward gradation from gold to azure is a striking visual effect that scientists don't fully understand. Current thinking says that it may be related to seasonal influences, tied to the cold temperatures in the northern (winter) hemisphere. Despite Cassini's revelations, Saturn remains a world of mystery.
Currently, the rings' shadows shield the mid-northern latitudes from the harshest of the sun's rays. As Saturn travels around the sun in its 29-year orbit, the shadows will narrow and head southward, eventually blanketing the opposite hemisphere.
Images taken with blue, green and red spectral filters were used to create this color view, which approximates the scene as it would appear to the human eye. The view was brightened to enhance detail visible in the rings and within their shadows.
The images were obtained with the Cassini wide-angle camera from a distance of approximately 999,000 kilometers (621,000 miles) from Saturn on May 4, 2005, as the spacecraft cruised a few degrees above the ring plane. The image scale is about 60 kilometers (37 miles) per pixel on Saturn.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Cassini briefly turned its gaze from Saturn and its rings and moons to marvel at the Carina Nebula, a brilliant region 8,000 light years from our solar system and more than 200 light years across. Nearly every point of light in this image is a star in our galaxy, the Milky Way.
The nebula is a region of gas and dust made to glow by the ultraviolet light bursting from bright, hot and extremely massive young stars within. Darker regions in the scene are not devoid of stars; rather, they are areas where dense clouds of dust block the light from background stars.
This image and others like it are taken by the spacecraft from time to time for calibration purposes. Calibration images rarely contain such incredible sights. This one affirms Cassini's position as the farthest, working astronomical observatory ever established around our sun -- our eyes on the cosmos, a billion miles from Earth.
The image was taken using the Cassini wide-angle camera on May 14, 2005. The view is a 68-second, clear-filter exposure.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Images taken using blue, green and red spectral filters were used to create this enhanced-color view; the color images were combined with an ultraviolet view that makes the high-altitude, detached layer of haze visible. The ultraviolet part of the composite image was given a purplish hue to match the bluish-purple color of the upper atmospheric haze seen in visible light.
Small particles that populate high hazes in Titan's atmosphere scatter short wavelengths more efficiently than longer visible or infrared wavelengths, so the best possible observations of the detached layer are made in ultraviolet light.
The images in this view were taken by the Cassini narrow-angle camera on May 5, 2005, at a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers (900,000 miles) from Titan and at a sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 137 degrees. Image scale is 8 kilometers (5 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 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
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