Darkness, Darkness
Darkness, darkness, be my pillow
Take my hand, and let me sleep
In the coolness of your shadow
In the silence of your deep
– Youngbloods
Image Credit: NASA, JPL, Space Science Institute
This rare color view of Saturn’s night side shows how the rings dimly illuminate the southern hemisphere, giving it a dull golden glow. Part of the northern dark side is just visible at top — the illumination it receives being far less than the south.
The unlit side of the rings is shown here. The portion of the rings closest to Cassini is within the dark shadow of Saturn; the bright distant portion is outside the planet’s shadow.
A crescent Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across) appears below the rings at left.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this color view. The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on April 2, 2006, at a distance of approximately 3.8 million kilometers (2.4 million miles) from Saturn and 3.5 kilometers (2.2 million miles) from Tethys. The image scale is about 23 kilometers (14 miles) per pixel on Saturn.
Another great view from Cassini. If memory serves, this is the first such image I’ve seen.
9 Responses to “Darkness, Darkness”
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You know, if Hubble is the happy-go-lucky tried and true friend of the celestial skies, then Cassini (or the Cassini imaging team) is the artful poet of roving telescopes. Really, they just keep plugging out some very cool images of Saturn and its moons.
Perhaps Saturn, by it’s exotic nature alone, calls for such images.
I’m impressed.
:-)
yesterday there was a dream fall to me in which I have seen that cassini was taking a short rest on the saturn’s rings, and was preparing plan to get a landing on the main ball of saturn, I have also seen in the dream that one of the saturn’s moon was covered with a sparkling oil on its surface, when one vehicle landed thereon it was just go away some 500 kms from that original distance, it was really scate from that place due to the silky platform of that moon. early in the morning I have also heard in the dream that saturn’s rings were creating a great noise like a big water fall it was revolving with horrible speed. I have also seen that saturn was doing a function to bring the outer things nearby it in roche limit, many big stones were resting on this planet but there was no impact further was falling on this planet. Really this dream was given me great amusement. ( it was a dream only). and today I found here the same thing and same heading of “darkness”, this is a great coincidence.
In short there may be great things about saturn and its moon we really like to know, there is a big darkness over this planet yet that has to come in light.
sunil
Wolve, I nearly forgot: I never did find the breakdown of the Deep Impact mission, even on all the NASA sites. So, I settled for the total cost to add to my doctored-up picture of Deep Impact slamming Comet Tempel 1. It’s a little bit wordy…might have to redo it, but it’s better than the one I did last July after hearing that news:
(If the image doesn’t work, can you fix it, please? It looks better against black.)
I also thanked Michael A’Hearn for the fun. I must have some latent child-giddiness about watching things blow up (as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone). For whatever reasons I enjoyed that mission immensely and Emily was very good in her reporting–all the little asides made it more engaging.
As far as the Russian woman, well that was just a bizarre piece of news. “Boo hoo, don’t rock my astrological world!”
Horrorscopes…~rolls eyes~
:-)
Grrrrrr…Deep Impact…against a white background.
Sunil,
You can listen to space sounds here. Saturn’s rings (the button at 5 o’clock) sounds like a VERY heavy rain. Or start at the intro at Space Sounds to hear recordings of the astronauts.
Just give it time to load so you don’t hear it all choppy.
I think this kid’s site is cute (and informative!). If you read it and click on each planet on the bottom, you’ll see why.
Science Monster–Our Solar System
Stop sitting there twiddling your thumbs.
Blog, damn you!
Oh, ok, write an article for your site! Damn you!
(How was that attempt at being bossy?
What comes around goes around…won’t you come out to play in the sun?
It showed in the preview…sigh.