![]() ![]() "The E ring in particular shows patterns that likely reflect disturbances from such diverse sources as sunlight and Enceladus’ gravity.”Ĭassini does not attempt many images of Earth because the sun is so close to our planet that an unobstructed view would damage the spacecraft's sensitive detectors. “This mosaic provides a remarkable amount of high-quality data on Saturn’s diffuse rings, revealing all sorts of intriguing structures we are currently trying to understand," said Matt Hedman, a Cassini participating scientist at the University of Idaho in Moscow. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI Larger Image This collage includes about 1,600 images submitted by members of the public as part of the NASA Cassini mission's "Wave at Saturn" campaign. #NASA PICTURE OF THE DAY PANORAMIC FULL#They use computers to increase dramatically the contrast of the images and change the color balance, for example, to see evidence for material tracing out the full orbits of the tiny moons Anthe and Methone for the first time. Scientists who focus on Saturn's rings look for patterns in optical bonanzas like these. Because it is so tenuous, it is best seen with light shining from behind it, when the tiny particles are outlined with light because of the phenomenon of diffraction. The E ring shines like a halo around Saturn and the inner rings. Zooming into the image reveals the moon and the icy plume emanating from its south pole, supplying fine, powder-sized icy particles that make up the E ring. Seven Saturnian moons are visible, including Enceladus on the left side of the image. Mars also appears, as a faint red dot, above and to the left of Venus. Venus is a bright dot to Saturn’s upper left. Earth is a bright blue dot to the lower right of Saturn. NASA invited the public to celebrate by finding Saturn in their part of the sky, waving at the ringed planet and sharing pictures over the Internet.Īn annotated version of the Saturn system mosaic labels points of interest. ![]() of Washington), the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) team, and R.The mosaic is part of Cassini's "Wave at Saturn" campaign, where on July 19, people for the first time had advance notice a spacecraft was taking their picture from planetary distances. > More: Hubble’s High-Definition Panoramic View of the Andromeda Galaxy STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. Most of the stars in the universe live inside such majestic star cities, and this is the first data that reveal populations of stars in context to their home galaxy. ![]() Never before have astronomers been able to see individual stars inside an external spiral galaxy over such a large contiguous area. This ambitious photographic cartography of the Andromeda galaxy represents a new benchmark for precision studies of large spiral galaxies that dominate the universe’s population of over 100 billion galaxies. And there are lots of stars in this sweeping view - over 100 million, with some of them in thousands of star clusters seen embedded in the disk. It’s like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand. Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, the Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in a 61,000-light-year-long stretch of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disk. The largest NASA Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled, this sweeping bird’s-eye view of a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) is the sharpest large composite image ever taken of our galactic next-door neighbor. Not much more to say about this other than that. ![]()
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