Rising Hegemon
Amazing picture of Saturn released by NASA. Take it away Astronomy Picture of the Day:
The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn drifted in giant planet's shadow for about 12 hours in 2006 and looked back toward the eclipsed Sun. Cassini saw a view unlike any other. First, the night side of Saturn is seen to be partly lit by light reflected from its own majestic ring system. Next, the rings themselves appear dark when silhouetted against Saturn, but quite bright when viewed away from Saturn, slightly scattering sunlight, in this exaggerated color image. Saturn's rings light up so much that new rings were discovered, although they are hard to see in the image. Seen in spectacular detail, however, is Saturn's E ring, the ring created by the newly discovered ice-fountains of the moon Enceladus and the outermost ring visible above. Far in the distance, at the left, just above the bright main rings, is the almost ignorable pale blue dot of Earth.
5 comments:
Here's the link - you gotta see it:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110904.html
"You've never seen anything until you've seen the sun through the rings of Saturn!"
This is how melting men are made, you know.
between this photo and the video of the 'footprints on the moon' I'd say NASA needs to spend a bit more $$ to hire an artist that can clean up the photos / videos so they don't look like they came out of a bad 3-d modeling program...
just above the bright main rings, is the almost ignorable pale blue dot of Earth.
It can never be stated enough - the universe doesn't really give a flying fuck about us.
you'd think we'd care about our blue dot.
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