Monday 7 December 2009

Advent with a difference

The Boston Globe is once again publishing photos from the Hubble Telescope for the day to Christmas (see here) .
The picture alongside is of Saturn: (if you click on it you get a bigger version which is much more spectacular or go here)
On February 24, 2009, the Hubble Space Telescope took a photo of four moons of Saturn passing in front of their parent planet. In this view, the giant orange moon Titan casts a large shadow onto Saturn's north polar hood. Below Titan, near the ring plane and to the left is the moon Mimas, casting a much smaller shadow onto Saturn's equatorial cloud tops. Farther to the left, and off Saturn's disk, are the bright moon Dione and the fainter moon Enceladus. These pictures were taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 when Saturn was at a distance of roughly 1.25 billion km (775 million mi) from Earth. (NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team, STScI/AURA).
We live in interesting times don't you think

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