File:Saturn Equinox 09212014.jpg

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English: Of the countless equinoxes Saturn has seen since the birth of the solar system, this one, captured here in a mosaic of light and dark, is the first witnessed up close by an emissary from Earth … none other than our faithful robotic explorer, Cassini.

Seen from our planet, the view of Saturn’s rings during equinox is extremely foreshortened and limited. But in orbit around Saturn, Cassini had no such problems. From 20 degrees above the ring plane, Cassini’s wide angle camera shot 75 exposures in succession for this mosaic showing Saturn, its rings, and a few of its moons a day and a half after exact Saturn equinox, when the sun’s disk was exactly overhead at the planet’s equator.

The novel illumination geometry that accompanies equinox lowers the sun’s angle to the ring plane, significantly darkens the rings, and causes out-of-plane structures to look anomalously bright and to cast shadows across the rings. These scenes are possible only during the few months before and after Saturn’s equinox which occurs only once in about 15 Earth years. Before and after equinox, Cassini’s cameras have spotted not only the predictable shadows of some of Saturn’s moons (see PIA11657), but also the shadows of newly revealed vertical structures in the rings themselves (see PIA11665).

Also at equinox, the shadows of the planet’s expansive rings are compressed into a single, narrow band cast onto the planet as seen in this mosaic. (For an earlier view of the rings’ wide shadows draped high on the northern hemisphere, see PIA09793.)

The images comprising the mosaic, taken over about eight hours, were extensively processed before being joined together. First, each was re-projected into the same viewing geometry and then digitally processed to make the image “joints” seamless and to remove lens flares, radially extended bright artifacts resulting from light being scattered within the camera optics.

At this time so close to equinox, illumination of the rings by sunlight reflected off the planet vastly dominates any meager sunlight falling on the rings. Hence, the half of the rings on the left illuminated by planetshine is, before processing, much brighter than the half of the rings on the right. On the right, it is only the vertically extended parts of the rings that catch any substantial sunlight.

With no enhancement, the rings would be essentially invisible in this mosaic. To improve their visibility, the dark (right) half of the rings has been brightened relative to the brighter (left) half by a factor of three, and then the whole ring system has been brightened by a factor of 20 relative to the planet. So the dark half of the rings is 60 times brighter, and the bright half 20 times brighter, than they would have appeared if the entire system, planet included, could have been captured in a single image.

The moon Janus (179 kilometers, 111 miles across) is on the lower left of this image. Epimetheus (113 kilometers, 70 miles across) appears near the middle bottom. Pandora (81 kilometers, 50 miles across) orbits outside the rings on the right of the image. The small moon Atlas (30 kilometers, 19 miles across) orbits inside the thin F ring on the right of the image. The brightnesses of all the moons, relative to the planet, have been enhanced between 30 and 60 times to make them more easily visible. Other bright specks are background stars. Spokes -- ghostly radial markings on the B ring -- are visible on the right of the image.

This view looks toward the northern side of the rings from about 20 degrees above the ring plane.

The images were taken on Aug. 12, 2009, beginning about 1.25 days after exact equinox, using the red, green and blue spectral filters of the wide angle camera and were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained at a distance of approximately 847,000 kilometers (526,000 miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 74 degrees. Image scale is 50 kilometers (31 miles) per pixel.
Date
Source http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA11667
Author NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Image modified by Jcpag2012
This image or video was catalogued by Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under Photo ID: PIA11667.

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Public domain This file is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". (See Template:PD-USGov, NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy.)
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12 August 2009

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current17:58, 4 June 2015Thumbnail for version as of 17:58, 4 June 20155,720 × 4,312 (956 KB)A2soupReverted to version as of 21:01, 21 February 2015
07:56, 3 May 2015Thumbnail for version as of 07:56, 3 May 20155,720 × 2,354 (1.41 MB)Jcpag2012loseless crop
07:19, 3 May 2015Thumbnail for version as of 07:19, 3 May 20155,720 × 4,312 (2.62 MB)Jcpag2012better color correction using Adobe Photoshop (CS5)
07:14, 3 May 2015Thumbnail for version as of 07:14, 3 May 20155,720 × 4,312 (956 KB)Jcpag2012Reverted to version as of 21:01, 21 February 2015
07:13, 3 May 2015Thumbnail for version as of 07:13, 3 May 20155,720 × 2,333 (1.41 MB)Jcpag2012loseless crop using [https://tools.wmflabs.org/croptool/ CropTool]
07:12, 3 May 2015Thumbnail for version as of 07:12, 3 May 20155,720 × 3,000 (2.14 MB)Jcpag2012better coloration, hue and saturation, edit using Adobe Photoshop (CS5)
07:07, 3 May 2015Thumbnail for version as of 07:07, 3 May 20155,720 × 4,312 (956 KB)Jcpag2012Reverted to version as of 21:01, 21 February 2015
07:05, 3 May 2015Thumbnail for version as of 07:05, 3 May 20155,720 × 2,324 (782 KB)Jcpag2012loseless crop
13:15, 30 April 2015Thumbnail for version as of 13:15, 30 April 20155,720 × 4,312 (956 KB)A2soupReverted to version as of 21:01, 21 February 2015, better framed when uncropped and color correction is unnecessary as this is already a NASA-processed image
01:37, 25 April 2015Thumbnail for version as of 01:37, 25 April 20155,604 × 2,700 (2.45 MB)Jcpag2012image rotated, color corrected using Photoshop CS5
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