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In 1818 Alexandre Henri Gabriel de Cassini (1781-1832), a French botanist hailing from a family of astronomers and cartographers, decided that the name by which our plant went also in Linnaeus - Othonna pectinata - was too confusing. Another plant was already called Othonna. So he devised the fitting new name 'Euryops' (= Wide-eyed) retaining the specific 'pectinatus'. Apparently that last word refers to the 'comblike' foliage (in learned English: pectinate).
It's a plant from southern Africa and was being grown in England by 1731 (The Botanical Magazine 1795: 306). In our Hortus it's in the South Africa glass house.
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Réalisé le 09 novembre 2015 au parc national Ankasa, Ghana, Afrique de l'ouest.
Cliquez sur la photo pour l'agrandir / click on the photograph to enlarge it.
Taken on November, 9th / 2015 at Ankasa National Park, Ghana, West Africa.
Processed using red, green, and blue filtered images taken by Cassini on August 31 2009. This is about 20 days following equinox, so the rings are facing the sun edge-on.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill
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Cassin’s flycatcher (Muscicapa cassini) is a small, rather unobtrusive songbird of the Old World flycatcher family, found across much of tropical West and Central Africa. It inhabits humid environments - especially swampy forest edges and wetlands - where it typically perches quietly before darting out to catch insects in mid-air.
This species is mostly gray-brown in appearance, with a subtle, plain plumage that helps it blend into shaded forest habitats. Unlike many migratory flycatchers, it is largely resident year-round, remaining within its rainforest range.
Despite its wide distribution, Cassin’s flycatcher is not especially conspicuous, and relatively little is known about its detailed behavior. However, its population is considered stable and of “Least Concern”, reflecting its adaptability within suitable wet forest habitats.
Casino's Flycatcher, also known as Cassin's Grey Flycatcher or Cassin's Alseonax, is a species of bird in the family Muscicapidae. These birds are always associated with water and this pair were seen over a river in Ankasa Forest, Ghana, West Africa.
Thanks for your visit… Any comment you make on my photograph is greatly appreciated and encouraging! But please do not use this image without permission.
Processed using calibrated red, green, and blue filtered images of Saturn's Rings, Mimas, and Epimetheus, taken by Cassini on November 6 2007.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill
In this rare image taken on 19 July, the wide-angle camera on the international Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn’s rings and our planet Earth and Moon in the same frame.
The dark side of Saturn, its bright limb, the main rings, the F ring, and the G and E rings are clearly seen; the limb of Saturn and the F ring are overexposed. The ‘breaks’ in the brightness of Saturn’s limb are due to the shadows of the rings on the globe of Saturn, preventing sunlight from shining through the atmosphere in those regions. The E and G rings have been brightened for better visibility.
Earth, 1.44 billion km away in this image, appears as a blue dot at centre right; the Moon can be seen as a fainter protrusion off its right side. The other bright dots nearby are stars.
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.
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This is a lunar image from the the 9th March. It shows part of the Mare Imbrium with large crater Archimedes (bottom) forming a triangle with craters Aristillus above left and Autolycus above right.
Crater Cassini (with two craters within) lies to the top left of the group.
Prominent scar of the lunar Alpine Valley is towards the top left corner and the sinuous snake-like Hadley Rille ( near the site of the Apollo 15 landing) is visible near the Apennine Mountains to the right of Autolycus.
The moon was around 9.7 days old when this image was captured.
Imaged with a Celestron C11 SCT and a ZWO 290MM camera with IR pass filter.
Thanks for looking!
In honor of Cassini's Grand Finale at Saturn, we're looking back on a very big discovery on a very small moon.
When Cassini arrived at Enceladus, one of Saturn's moons, it saw curtains of icy material venting into space. Then, using the Composite Infrared Spectrometer aboard the spacecraft, scientists discovered that Enceladus's south pole was much warmer than expected. The strange temperature patterns on Enceladus suggested that the small, icy moon was up to something. Read more: www.instagram.com/p/BZCGUMgFN0D/
The Grand Finale
On Sept. 15, NASA's Cassini spacecraft will complete its remarkable story of exploration with an intentional plunge into Saturn's atmosphere, ending its mission after nearly 20 years in space.
Processed using calibrated infrared, green, and ultraviolet filtered images of Enceladus taken by Cassini on August 1 2017.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill
The famous emergence of the 17-year Cicada is not scheduled, for my area, until next year (Brood 10).
However yesterday, I had over one-hundred individuals emerge (a year earlier than expected) in my yard (I counted their cast skins). I only found one adult which turned out to be a male Cassini's 17-year Cicada (Megicicada cassini).
Three species make up the brood 10 emergence, but since I only found one adult, the other two species may also have emerged yesterday in my yard.
As impressive as my hundred or so Periodical Cicada hatch was yesterday, I know it will pale in comparison to next year. I can't wait!!
Beaverbrook Environs, Howard County, Maryland.
RGB natural color. Added blooming/white overlay at top right corner to cover over-exposure defects.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill
NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its final approach to Saturn and dove into the planet's atmosphere on Friday, Sept. 15. Loss of contact with the Cassini spacecraft took place on Sept. 15 at 7:55:46 a.m. EDT (4:55:46 a.m. PDT).
This marvelous panoramic view of Saturn was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on Sept. 15, 2006. The full mosaic consists of three rows of nine wide-angle camera footprints; only a portion of the full mosaic is shown here. Color in the view was created by digitally compositing ultraviolet, infrared and clear filter images and was then adjusted to resemble natural color. The mosaic images were acquired as the spacecraft drifted in the darkness of Saturn's shadow for about 12 hours, allowing a multitude of unique observations of the microscopic particles that compose Saturn's faint rings.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at ciclops.org.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Phosphorus, a key chemical element for many biological processes, has been found in icy grains emitted by the small moon and is likely abundant in its subsurface ocean.
Using data collected by NASA’s Cassini mission, an international team of scientists has discovered phosphorus – an essential chemical element for life – locked inside salt-rich ice grains ejected into space from Enceladus.
The small moon is known to possess a subsurface ocean, and water from that ocean erupts through cracks in Enceladus' icy crust as geysers at its south pole, creating a plume. The plume then feeds Saturn's E ring (a faint ring outside of the brighter main rings) with icy particles.
During its mission at the gas giant from 2004 to 2017, Cassini flew through the plume and E ring numerous times. Scientists found that Enceladus' ice grains contain a rich array of minerals and organic compounds – including the ingredients for amino acids – associated with life as we know it.
In this image, seen as a bright arc in this 2006 observation by Cassini, Saturn’s E ring is fed with icy particles from Enceladus’ plume, creating wispy fingers of bright material that is backlit by the Sun. The shadowed hemisphere of the moon can be seen as a dark dot inside the ring.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
#NASA #Cassini #JPL #JetPropulsionLaboratory #NASAMarshall #SolarSystemandBeyond #space #astronomy #Saturn #astronomy #planet #Enceladus
The Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn was intended to explore the rings and moons of that great planet. Titan was a prime target. To the extent that Enceladus was considered, it was thought to be a boring ice coated planet. Which is why there were no instruments on board specifically focused on figuring out what exactly Enceladus was expelling from geysers on its surface thousands of feet into space, which we didn't know was happening until it was captured by Cassini. But NASA was able to shift trajectories and visit Enceladus many more times than originally intended, and repurpose some instruments to figure out that rather than a boring ball of solid ice, Enceladus has a subsurface ocean of water beneath 20 miles of ice. And that was the source of the geysers.
We need to send another mission to Saturn to find out more, because with all that water, Enceladus may be capable of hosting life.
Cassini ended its mission by plunging into Saturn. This was not how the spaceship was intended to end, but the decision was made to do so so that the spaceship would not accidentally hit Enceladus at some point in the future and contaminate it, thereby depriving us of the opportunity to discover if life has arisen elsewhere in our solar system.
On a personal note, I had to include something from Cassini because it's the one space mission my dad worked on. I didn't find out about that until my mom told me after he died.
Processed using RED, GRN, BL1 filtered images taken by Cassini's WAC on August 19 2012.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill
A short story about this image (in italian):
aliveuniverse.today/speciale-missioni/sistema-solare/cass...
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech - Processing: Elisabetta Bonora & Marco Faccin / aliveuniverse.today
As NASA's Cassini spacecraft spends its last few weeks in orbit around Saturn before making a controlled impact with the planet in what NASA dubbed Cassini's "Grand Finale," some of those who helped launch the mission 20 years ago are thrilled with the success of the massive probe they helped dispatch to one of the solar system's most intriguing worlds.
Image credit: NASA
NASA's Cassini spacecraft has delivered a glorious view of Saturn, taken while the spacecraft was in Saturn's shadow. The cameras were turned toward Saturn and the sun so that the planet and rings are backlit. (The sun is behind the planet, which is shielding the cameras from direct sunlight.) In addition to the visual splendor, this special, very-high-phase viewing geometry lets scientists study ring and atmosphere phenomena not easily seen at a lower phase. Cassini's discoveries are feeding forward into future exploration of the solar system.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
The species, Magicicada cassini, is the least abundant of the three species of Brood X, Periodical Cicadas that are emerging from my yard. It also seems (based on three days of data) to be declining in numbers compared to the other two species. On May 13th it made up 8% of the emerged adults, on May 14th 5% and today May 15th only 2%. Just to be safe I took a photo of it today to make sure I had a photographic record of the species from the 2021 emergence.
To see the other two species of Brood X see: www.flickr.com/photos/dragonflyhunter/51182806043/in/phot... & www.flickr.com/photos/dragonflyhunter/51185133113/in/date...
Beaverbook Environs, Howard county, Maryland.
During its seven-year Solstice Mission, Cassini watched as a huge storm erupted and encircled Saturn. Scientists think storms like this are related, in part, to seasonal effects of sunlight on Saturn's atmosphere.
Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Saturn's hexagonal polar jet stream is the shining feature of almost every view of the north polar region of Saturn. The region, in shadow for the first part of the Cassini mission, now enjoys full sunlight, which enables Cassini scientists to directly image it in reflected light.
Although the sunlight falling on the north pole of Saturn is enough to allow us to image and study the region, it does not provide much warmth. In addition to being low in the sky (just like summer at Earth's poles), the sun is nearly ten times as distant from Saturn as from Earth. This results in the sunlight being only about 1 percent as intense as at our planet.
This view looks toward Saturn from about 31 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 22, 2017 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 939 nanometers.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 560,000 miles (900,000 kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is 33 miles (54 kilometers) per pixel.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Space science image of the week:
The international Cassini spacecraft has completed half of the 22 dives between Saturn and its rings before concluding its mission on 15 September. Cassini has been exploring the Saturnian system for 13 years, and has been making a series of ‘grand finale’ orbits since 22 April, taking the spacecraft into previously unexplored territory.
The image shown here was captured on 7 June, on the approach to the eighth dive. It is a raw image taken with the wide-angle camera and shows the planet, its rings, and a projection of Saturn’s shadow onto the inner rings.
Each of the 22 elliptical orbits takes about six and a half days to complete, and sends the spacecraft diving through a 2 400 km wide space at speeds of 121 000–126 000 km/h.
As well as returning stunning images, the dives are enabling unique data to be collected that will help scientists solve mysteries regarding the mass of Saturn’s rings and the planet’s rotation rate. In the final five orbits the spacecraft will also dip down to directly sample Saturn’s upper atmosphere.
Following the last orbit, the spacecraft will make a distant flyby of Titan that will alter Cassini’s trajectory one final time, sending it into a controlled plunge into the planet’s atmosphere to conclude this incredible mission.
Read more about the grand finale here and check out the latest images in the raw image gallery.
The Cassini–Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and ASI, the Italian space agency.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Saturn’s moon Titan is enveloped in a thick atmosphere, but through the infrared eyes of the international Cassini mission, the moon’s myriad surface features are revealed in this exquisite global mosaic.
Observing the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, in visible light is difficult due to the globe-enshrouding haze that envelops the moon. On 14 January 2005, the mystery as to what lay beneath the thick atmosphere was revealed as ESA’s Huygens probe – carried to Titan by Cassini – made the first successful landing on a world in the outer Solar System. During the two-and-a-half hour descent under parachute, features that looked remarkably like shore lines and river systems on Earth appeared from the haze. But rather than water, with surface temperatures of around –180ºC, the fluid involved here is methane, a simple organic compound that also contributes to the moon’s obscuring atmosphere.
Thanks to Cassini, which studied Saturn and its rings and moons for thirteen years, Titan was extensively mapped and analysed. One result is this stunning sequence of images created using data acquired by Cassini’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), whose infrared observations peered through Titan’s atmosphere, complementing the views obtained by Huygens during descent and on the surface. The maps combine data from the multitude of different observations made under a wide variety of illumination and viewing conditions over the course of the mission, stitched together in a seamless mosaic to provide the best representation of Titan’s surface to date.
The colours reflect variations in materials on the moon’s surface. For example, the moon’s equatorial dune fields appear a consistent brown colour, while bluish and purple hues may indicate materials enriched in water ice.
The image was first published in July 2018 – read more here about how the image was created, and enjoy a video featuring further stunning visuals here. The complete Cassini VIMS data archive of Saturn’s satellites is available here.
The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and Italy’s ASI space agency. The mission concluded in September 2017.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Nantes/University of Arizona
Space Science image of the week:
In a fitting farewell to the planet that had been its home for over 13 years, the international Cassini spacecraft took one last, lingering look at Saturn and the splendid rings during the final leg of its journey and snapped a series of images that has been assembled into this new mosaic.
The mission concluded on 15 September with a planned dramatic plunge into the planet’s atmosphere. Two days earlier it captured wide-angle images to cover the planet and its main rings from one end to the other. The moons Prometheus, Pandora, Janus, Epimetheus, Mimas and Enceladus also make a faint appearance in the background. Can you spot them? (Click here for a labelled version of this image.)
The image shown here has been brightened to reveal the details of the moons and rings; the original natural colour view can be found here.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 15° above the ring plane. Cassini was 1.1 million km from Saturn, on its final approach to the planet, when the 42 red, green and blue images in this mosaic were taken. They were combined and mosaicked together to create a natural-colour view. The image scale on Saturn is about 67 km/ pixel. The image scale on the moons varies from 59 km/pixel to 80 km/pixel. The Sun-planet-spacecraft angle is 138°.
The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and Italy’s ASI space agency.
The image was first released on 20 November. Read the full story via the NASA website.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Saturn's shadow stretched beyond the edge of its rings for many years after Cassini first arrived at Saturn, casting an ever-lengthening shadow that reached its maximum extent at the planet's 2009 equinox. This image captured the moment in 2015 when the shrinking shadow just barely reached across the entire main ring system. The shadow will continue to shrink until the planet’s northern summer solstice, at which point it will once again start lengthening across the rings, reaching across them in 2019.
Like Earth, Saturn is tilted on its axis. And, just as on Earth, as the sun climbs higher in the sky, shadows get shorter. The projection of the planet's shadow onto the rings shrinks and grows over the course of its 29-year-long orbit, as the angle of the sun changes with respect to Saturn's equator.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 11 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 16, 2015.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is about 90 miles (150 kilometers) per pixel.
The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, click here.
Space Science image of the week:
The international Cassini mission is drawing to a close in spectacular style: diving between Saturn and its innermost rings and exploring uncharted territory like never before.
The final set of five dives even dips the spacecraft into the top of Saturn’s atmosphere, giving Cassini’s instruments the chance to make the first direct sampling of the planet, studying its chemical composition and analysing its temperature at different altitudes. The dives will also provide close-up images of the planet’s atmospheric features, including its polar vortex and aurora.
Cassini is just completing its third of such atmospheric ‘dips’, and towards the end of the final orbit, will make a distant flyby of Titan, at 119 049 km on 11 September. But this will still be close enough to set Cassini on its final trajectory into the planet’s atmosphere, concluding its 13-year odyssey in the Saturn system.
Additional details of the mission’s grand finale will be presented by NASA tomorrow in a dedicated media briefing, scheduled for 18:00 GMT / 20:00 CEST.
The image shown here was captured during an earlier dive between the planet and its rings, at a distance of approximately 1.1 million kilometers from Saturn on 13 May. It shows the thin sliver of Saturn’s 86 km-wide moon Prometheus lurking near ghostly structures in Saturn's narrow F-ring. Many of the narrow ring’s faint and wispy features result from its gravitational interactions with Prometheus.
Most of the small moon’s surface is in darkness because of the viewing geometry: Cassini was positioned behind Saturn and Prometheus with respect to the Sun, looking towards the moon’s dark side and just a bit of the moon’s sunlit northern hemisphere. Detail in the sunlit side of the rings shows a distinct difference in brightness between the outermost section of Saturn’s A ring (left of centre) and the rest of the ring, interior to the Keeler Gap (lower left).
The image was first released on 7 August 2017.
The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and Italy’s ASI space agency.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Saturn showing off the Cassini Division within its rings and the moon Titan directly above the planet. Taken with a ZWOASI 120MC planetary camera using an Explore Scientific 102ED refracting telescope.
Cassini gazes across the icy rings of Saturn toward the icy moon Tethys, whose night side is illuminated by Saturnshine, or sunlight reflected by the planet.
Tethys was on the far side of Saturn with respect to Cassini here; an observer looking upward from the moon's surface toward Cassini would see Saturn's illuminated disk filling the sky.
Tethys was brightened by a factor of two in this image to increase its visibility. A sliver of the moon's sunlit northern hemisphere is seen at top. A bright wedge of Saturn's sunlit side is seen at lower left.
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 10 degrees above the ring plane. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on May 13, 2017.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Saturn’s rings display their subtle colors in this view captured on Aug. 22, 2009, by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The particles that make up the rings range in size from smaller than a grain of sand to as large as mountains, and are mostly made of water ice. The exact nature of the material responsible for bestowing color on the rings remains a matter of intense debate among scientists.
Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. Cassini's narrow-angle camera took the images at a distance of approximately 1.27 million miles (2.05 million kilometers) from the center of the rings.
The Cassini spacecraft ended its mission on Sept. 15, 2017.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Monument celebrating Cassini spacecraft probe of the planet Saturn. At McMurry University, Abilene, Texas, USA.
Camera: 1952 Argus Forty medium-format camera with 75mm f4.5 Varex Anastigmat lens
Film: Ilford Delta 100
Developing: Caffenol-CM.
In its season of "lasts," NASA's Cassini spacecraft made its final close approach to Saturn's moon Mimas on January 30, 2017. At closest approach, Cassini passed 25,620 miles (41,230 kilometers) from Mimas. All future observations of Mimas will be from more than twice this distance.
This mosaic is one of the highest resolution views ever captured of the icy moon.
Close approaches to Mimas have been somewhat rare during Cassini's mission, with only seven flybys at distances of less than 31,000 miles (50,000 kilometers).
Mimas' surface is pockmarked with countless craters, the largest of which gives the icy moon its distinctive appearance. (See PIA12568 for more info on Mimas' distinctive crater, Herschel.)
Two versions of the mosaic are provided. In one, the left side, which is lit by reflected light from Saturn, has been enhanced in brightness in order to show the full surface. The second version features more natural illumination levels.
Imaging scientists combined ten narrow-angle camera images to create this mosaic view. The scene is an orthographic projection centered on terrain at 17.5 degrees south latitude, 325.4 degrees west longitude on Mimas. An orthographic view is most like the view seen by a distant observer looking through a telescope.
This mosaic was acquired at a distance of approximately 28,000 miles (45,000 kilometers) from Mimas. Image scale is approximately 820 feet (250 meters) per pixel. The images were taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 30, 2017.
The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (the European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and www.nasa.gov/cassini. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at ciclops.org.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
The subject of this image bears a remarkable resemblance to a porous sea sponge, floating in the inky black surroundings of the deep sea.
Indeed, the cold, hostile and lonely environment of deep water is not too far removed from deep space, the actual setting for this image in which one of Saturn’s outer moons, Hyperion, can be seen in incredible detail. This image was taken by Cassini when the spacecraft performed a flyby of the small moon on 26 September 2005.
During the flyby, Cassini got more than it bargained for as Hyperion unleashed a burst of charged particles towards the spacecraft, effectively delivering a giant 200-volt electric shock. It appears that Hyperion’s surface becomes electrostatically charged as it is bathed in charged particles – both those constantly streaming out into space from the Sun and those trapped within the magnetic field of the moon’s host planet, Saturn.
While astronomers expected many bodies throughout the Solar System to be charged, the data from the Cassini flyby represent the first-ever experience of a charged natural object in space other than our own Moon.
Hyperion is shaped a bit like a potato and, with dimensions of 410 x 260 x 220 km, is one of the largest bodies in the Solar System known to be so irregular. Its odd, almost ‘bubbly’ appearance, can be attributed to it having a very low density for its size. Because of these properties the entire moon is porous, like a sponge, with well-preserved craters of all shapes and sizes packed together across its surface. Scientists think that this moon is mostly made up of water ice, with small amounts of rock.
Images taken using infrared, green and ultraviolet filters were combined to create this view. The natural redness of Hyperion’s surface was toned down in this false-colour image to enhance the visibility of the moon’s surface features
Cassini was approximately 62 000 km from Hyperion when the image was taken, and the image scale is 362 m per pixel.
The Cassini–Huygens mission is a cooperative project between NASA, ESA and Italy’s ASI space agency.
This image was previously released on the JPL photojournal image archive in September 2005.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Dione appears cut in two by Saturn's razor-thin rings, seen nearly edge-on in a view from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. This scene was captured from just 0.02 degrees above the ring plane.
The bright streaks of Dione's wispy terrain are seen near the moon's limb at right. The medium-sized crater Turnus (63 miles, 101 kilometers, wide) is visible along Dione's terminator.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Dec. 25, 2015. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) from Dione and at a Sun-Dione-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 115 degrees. Image scale is 8.6 miles (13.8 kilometers) per pixel.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute