Hubble Telescope Captures Saturn's Twin Aurorae

dailymail.co.uk:

A spectacular light show on Saturn has been captured in unique new photos of the ringed planet.

The aurora images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) were made possible by a rare chance to see the planet with its rings edge-on and both poles in view.

It takes Saturn almost 30 years to orbit the Sun, and during that time such a picture opportunity occurs only twice.

Read the whole story: dailymail.co.uk

Comments

[RTIII]

12:36 PM on 02/16/2010

The article wasn't well written.

While it's true that in the tilt of axis versus plane of rotation, the disks are only edge on twice per orbit, this ignores the fact that Earth orbit and Satur's orbit are NOT in the same plane. Therefore, while a stationary object might only see the edge-on view every 15 years, Earth is moving both around its own orbital plane AND at a very different rate of rotation. Additional­ly, the earth has a very different orbital period - about 1/30 of Saturn - and as such there's very little relative change in Saturn's axial orientatio­n per Earth year. Finally, the orbits precess - they are not fixed but progress _backwards­_ (to the direction of orbit) - such that the tilts are constantly changing relative to one another.

Therefore there are most certainly periods when someone on the surface of Earth sees Saturn's rings edge on for years at a time, twice a year, and other times when such alignment is vanishingl­y brief.
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[mrjames1]

10:53 PM on 02/15/2010

Hubble continues to amaze. And only for a few billion dollars. Go Hubble!

[kapalabhati]

07:49 PM on 02/15/2010

Stunning. I love Saturn. I dream about it. Time to let my nerd flag fly!

[amdezurik]

06:09 PM on 02/15/2010

great view. the only problem is now that all to many people will think that sound track is relevant..­.

[totalliberal]

05:19 AM on 02/16/2010

Saturn is a very noisy planet, radio wise. Translatin­g radio waves into sound is no big trick. Even Jack Benny knew how to do it.

[mcmutter]

03:44 PM on 02/15/2010

there is plenty of really cool stuff out there .......