12/20/2004: Dione

A beautiful space image that's not Hubble? This is Dione, a moon of Saturn, as seen by Cassini. NASA writes:

Cassini captured Dione against the globe of Saturn as it approached the icy moon for its close rendezvous on Dec. 14, 2004. This natural color view shows the moon has strong variations in brightness across its surface, but a remarkable lack of color, compared to the warm hues of Saturn's atmosphere. Several oval-shaped storms are present in the planet's atmosphere, along with ripples and waves in the cloud bands.

Kinda looks like a back lit bullet hole through the planet.

Cool stuff, I hope they can get a shot of the lightning too.<blockquote> BEIJING, Dec. 20 (Xinhuanet) -- New data obtained from the Cassini spacecraft revealed that lightning on Saturn is a million times stronger than on Earth.

Cassini, the NASA probe currently orbiting Saturn, picked up radio signals from Earth lightning as far out as 89,200 kilometres. When the spacecraft approached Saturn last July, it started detecting lightning signals at a point about 161 million kilometres from the planet.

"This means that radio signals from Saturn's lightning are on the order of one million times stronger than Earth's lightning. That's just astonishing to me." Dr Don Gurnett, a space physicist from the University of Iowa, was quoted by The Scotsman as saying. </blockquote>[<a href="http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=1448772004">Reference story</a>]

Hmm,when did I last see a picture of saturn without its ring.
Nice pic :D

Wormfood wrote:

Hmm,when did I last see a picture of saturn without its ring.

Probably that time that the private investigator took pictures of saturn hanging out in singles bars trying to pick up loose satellites ...

Oh, I dunno, if they're that loose they won't let a ring get in the way.

wolf wrote:

Probably that time that the private investigator took pictures of saturn hanging out in singles bars trying to pick up loose satellites ...

Wolf, You crack me up :lol:

Tony,

This image is beautiful. There's something about it that's so compelling - like an amazing piece of abstract art. It's hard to believe it's not deliberately composed. The combination of contrasts is awesome - Saturn against the blackness of space, the moon against saturn (the position/placement of the moon against saturn), the black curved shades in the moon mirroring the blackness of space - too cool....

I almost expect to see pinball flippers somewhere.