OK, here's a color one before I go to bed

[mmcirvin]

This is Enceladus against the disc of Saturn, a not-quite-true-color picture taken in infrared, green and ultraviolet light. A little misregistered around the edges, and I was unable to completely get rid of the ghosts of the dropouts induced by the effect they had on the raw images' JPEG compression. But it's nice.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Near the top of this picture there are some craters that were given names after they were seen by the Voyagers; they're named out of the Arabian Nights. Of the snowman-like chain of three craters near top center, the biggest is named Dunyazad and the second-biggest is Shahrazad (another spelling of Scheherazade). Shahryar is the really sharp-looking one further up and Sindbad is half-visible on the horizon.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...on the terminator, I should have said: I think it's directly to the right of Shahryar.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Are you up to speed on the latest Hoagland lunacy (http://www.enterprisemission.com)? He has taken on Iapetus with the usual, ah, aplomb.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

At this point, we can basically predict what he's going to say about everything beforehand. Hoagland's aliens are like the God of the Gaps; everything not currently explained should be attributed to aliens immediately. If you can attribute some things that are explained as well, that's a bonus. But whenever there's a genuine mystery, those aliens are on the scene.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of crescent-Tethys and crescent-Enceladus pictures up there now, some more distant shots of Tethys from yesterday that show another large crater that I think hasn't been imaged well up to now (it could be the big one next to Ithaca Chasma that Cassini caught a while back), and some more icon-sized shots of Mimas in classic Death Star pose (with Herschel away from the terminator). In some of them, the dark hemisphere of Mimas is noticeably darker than the dark background, which raises the question of what it's in front of; probably the night side of Saturn, could be the Milky Way, zodiacal light and/or E ring. I don't have time to play with them at the moment, but they're worth checking out.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, some of the later, smaller Enceladus pictures have a lot of Saturn-shine on the night hemisphere, and you can make out the tidal elongation of Enceladus just as with Mimas earlier, though it's nowhere near as extreme (Enceladus is a little further out). In the picture above you can't really see it because you're looking straight along the Enceladus-Saturn line.