Yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day
Yesterday's Astronomy Picture of the Day (a website maintained by Robert Nemiroff & Jerry Bonnell on the Goddard Space Flight Center website) is a wide-angle view produced by amateur Fernando Garcia Navarro using Cassini images taken in February. This color view shows Saturn's rings edge-on, an event that occurs on earth every 15 years or so. This is also the kind of view of Saturn that would be seen from Saturn's larger moons, like Titan. Often in artist renderings of Titan, the artist can't fight the temptation to show Saturn with its rings, which is not how Saturn would be viewed from that satellite. Still, without the rings, I think this is a great view of this majestic planet.
posted by Jason Perry at 10:41 AM
2 Comments:
One of the many things I really enjoyed about Lorenz and Mitton's Unveiling Titan is the fact that virtually every caption for an "artist's impression" mentions that the rings are wrong. That sort of laziness drives me nuts.
Meanwhile, I've often wondered what sort of cosmology a pre-scientific people would come up with if they lived on a planet-sized moon orbiting a ringed giant planet. Imagine how blown their minds would be the first time they saw the rings from a spacecraft!
This is a nice image though I would like to see the caption explain more clearly that it appears to be "enhanced" color vs a true-color as they are usually careful to point out on the CICLOPS released images.
Steve Albers
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