Celestia Forums

The Cassini spacecraft has captured images of the Sun illuminating Saturn's atmosphere and rings from behind. Only the raw images have been released so far, but even those are looking spectacular. Here's an article about the occultation:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=20837

Some folks over at the Umanned Spaceflight forums have been busy processing the raw images. This one shows two different exposures:

http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/inde ... st&id=7488

Note the 'diamond ring' appearance of the Sun and Saturn's atmosphere in short exposure image. Ringshine on Saturn is very apparent in the longer exposure. I'll have to try modeling that in Celestia and also switch to a more sophisticated ring illumination function.

--Chris

Another thing to note in the long exposure image is how bright the E ring appears. Enceladus is in the middle of the ring in the upper right, the obvious source of the ring material. It's no wonder the ring scientists are so excited about this sequence of observations.

--Chris

Wow . . . the Earth and Mercury in the same image as Saturn's rings:

http://static.flickr.com/82/247466918_474c7ee13d_b.jpg

--Chris

I like how the rings appear to light up the night sky on saturn in that last pic.

chris wrote:Wow . . . the Earth and Mercury in the same image as Saturn's rings:...

Yep, nice! I suppose Saturn will receive the same treatment as Titan? (Fridger )

I'm unable to recreate the very same image with Celestia; there is a problem with the position Earth/Enceladus/Mercury vs the angular position of the rings...

I think that's got to be the most stunning image I've seen from Cassini so far... Wow!

ElChristou wrote: I'm unable to recreate the very same image with Celestia; there is a problem with the position Earth/Enceladus/Mercury vs the angular position of the rings...

Celestia computes the positions of all these objects correctly. Remember that the Cassini image has a small field of view. Have you set the FOV properly in Celestia?

--Chris

The pictures are amizing.

Those pictures are pretty incredible: the backlighting really brings out the detail. Might have to change my avatar...

chris wrote:

ElChristou wrote: I'm unable to recreate the very same image with Celestia; there is a problem with the position Earth/Enceladus/Mercury vs the angular position of the rings...

Celestia computes the positions of all these objects correctly. Remember that the Cassini image has a small field of view. Have you set the FOV properly in Celestia?

--Chris

Yep, Enceladus is ok but if you place correctly Earth, Mercury is too far from the edge of the main rings and vice versa...

EDIT: as you can see in Sym's shot...

http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/i ... 017924.jpg

Wibble.