A view no one has ever seen before: Saturn’s complete disk,…
A view no one has ever seen before: Saturn’s complete disk, separate from its rings. It was created by Croatian software developer and amateur astrophotographer Gordan Ugarkovic, who combined a 3×4 mosaic of raw Cassini images taken October 10, 2013.
More details from Emiky Lakdawalla’s blog at the Planetary Society: One for the history books.
The more I look at it the more cool things there are to notice: The hard-edged shadow on the rings (because the sun doesn’t subtend the half-degree of arc that it does from the Earth and Moon, leading to an ever-so-slight gradation at the edge of lunar shadows from the partially eclipsed solar disk). The hexagonal feature at Saturn’s pole. The illumination on Saturn’s night side from the ring itself, and the way it fades near local midnight (because of the planet’s shadow on the rings) and near the equator (because from there the rings go edge-on and disappear from the perspective of an observer on Saturn’s surface).
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/64301192221.
Tags: cassini, saturn, emily lakdawalla, space photos, gordan ugarkovic, space.
