Crescent Saturn
Aug. 15th, 2006 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinCassini took an interesting wide-angle color triplet on July 26, which I have made into a couple of color images:
The clouds of Saturn look golden-yellow in pictures taken from the vantage point of Earth. Earth is located, by Saturnian standards, very close to the Sun, so what we're seeing is the light scattered back almost 180 degrees. They mostly look like that from Cassini too, but Cassini pictures have revealed the surprising fact that in deep Saturnian winter/summer, the winter hemisphere shadowed by the rings looks distinctly blue. We can't see much of this hemisphere from Earth near the Saturnian solstices, because the rings are in the way. I tried to make my own color composite of that last image before JPL released theirs, and I actually toned down the blue color in my version because I thought it couldn't be right—a classic case of my own prejudices tripping me up.
We're closer to equinox now, but this latest picture shows that, seen from the night side in a thin crescent, the forward-scattered light near the terminator has a silvery color, with little of the golden-yellow hue visible. By way of comparison, in the second picture I've brightened up the image to bring out the colors of the rings: seen from their dark side in forward-scattered light, they are dark brown.
The clouds of Saturn look golden-yellow in pictures taken from the vantage point of Earth. Earth is located, by Saturnian standards, very close to the Sun, so what we're seeing is the light scattered back almost 180 degrees. They mostly look like that from Cassini too, but Cassini pictures have revealed the surprising fact that in deep Saturnian winter/summer, the winter hemisphere shadowed by the rings looks distinctly blue. We can't see much of this hemisphere from Earth near the Saturnian solstices, because the rings are in the way. I tried to make my own color composite of that last image before JPL released theirs, and I actually toned down the blue color in my version because I thought it couldn't be right—a classic case of my own prejudices tripping me up.
We're closer to equinox now, but this latest picture shows that, seen from the night side in a thin crescent, the forward-scattered light near the terminator has a silvery color, with little of the golden-yellow hue visible. By way of comparison, in the second picture I've brightened up the image to bring out the colors of the rings: seen from their dark side in forward-scattered light, they are dark brown.