Saturnian Shadowplay

I love Cassini shots of Saturn that make me do a double-take.

The image above (taken on Feb. 11, 2016) is a little confusing, isn’t it? It took me a second to figure it out, but then it clicked into place. What you’re seeing is a narrow-angle shot of Saturn’s rings (seen as the lines going from slightly upper left to lower right). The rings aren’t opaque, but actually translucent. In this show we can see through them to the cloud tops of Saturn below, where the rings are casting a shadow (the fainter arcs going from lower left to upper right). They’re curved because the shadows are cast onto the curved “surface” of Saturn, distorting them.

This image, taken in 2014, might help:

Cool, eh? And all this wasn’t even the reason the newer shot was taken! If you look in the gap in the rings, just to the left of center in the image, you’ll see a tiny dot. That’s the moon Pan, the actual target of this observation! The rings and shadowplay are just happy bonuses. Pan orbits Saturn in the Encke Gap, a 325-km-wide band in the rings where Pan’s gravity has ejected most of the small icy ring particles.

Saturn is weird. Its rings are weird. Its moons are weird. Everything about it is weird.

That’s one of the reasons I love it.

Tip o' the RTG to Riding With Robots.

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