Tenuous Rings (2014)

Edit 2014 Feb 28: Whoops, that’s not a moon, it’s Venus. This particular image was already featured at JPL’s Cassini website, here. I’ll have to get better at tracking these things down. I also missed the speck of a star which ended up disappearing when I cleaned up the various hot pixels polluting the image, which is now fixed. Planetary imaging is definitely challenging. My image is at least slightly different, though. I used Infrared, Blue, and Violet filters instead of the RGB ones because I thought Saturn’s limb had overexposed-looking hard white edges in the RGB filters. The trade-off is that the colors are shifted a little from natural.

Saturn’s E and G rings are most easily viewed when the Sun is occulted.

These data were acquired in January 2013.

Red: CB3 (Infrared)
Green: BL1 (Blue)
Blue: VIO (Violet)

START_TIME >= 2013-01-04 22:48:19.0
START_TIME <= 2013-01-04 22:54:07.0
Instrument = ISS