Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Saturnian Satellite Mutual Events from Cassini

tedstryk and Gsnorgathon posted a message on the MER forum regarding satellite mutual events as seen from Cassini. Mutual events are occurances where one satellite gets between another satellite and the sun or between another satellite an the observer. The former case is impossible in the current orbital position, but now that Cassini is much closer to the Saturn's equatorial plane, the latter case is. The post, linked above, mentions one such mutual event with Tethys and Dione and is best seen animated, as Gsnorgathon describes.

Update: Turns out that the moon in the background is not Tethys, but is instead Rhea. Also, MizarKey at the forum thread linked in this post's title has created an animated gif showing the mutual event.

Update2: Thanks to the Solar System Simulator for confirming the background moon as Rhea (compare with the Cassini view).

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

tedstryk deserves all the credit. I just re-arranged the frame order.

This is one of the things I love about tabbed browsing. Your own cheap little animation studio! ctrl-tab-tab-tab-tab... :@)

2/21/2005 04:21:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

And for the obsessive-compulsive, here are both solar system simulator views, so you can see the distance from Cassini to each:

DioneRheaMaybe there's a way to get the SSS to display the distance to both bodies in one image?

2/23/2005 11:04:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ah, crud. It previewed OK...

2/23/2005 11:17:00 PM  
Blogger Jason Perry said...

The links seem to run okay. Thanks.

2/24/2005 10:31:00 AM  

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