Lord of the Rings

I know I just posted about cool Mars pictures a few days ago, but when Cassini delivers, you kinda have to pay attention.

Cassini is a space probe that has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, and has been sending Earthward a nearly unending stream of images that awe and delight. Closeups of Titan have revealed lakes of liquid ethane, an image of the moon Iapetus shows it to be encircled by an enormous ridge of unknown origin, and animated series of images reveal the complex and graceful dance of moons as they play out their enthrallment to gravity.

But sometimes the images are jaw-dropping, stunning, and you just have to stop and stare in wonder.

Look at that! As Cassini took several hours to orbit along the far side of Saturn from the Sun, it took a mosaic of images, combined here, to show Saturn back-lit and ethereal. The rings are shockingly clear. When Saturn's rings were discovered 400 years ago, their nature was unknown. It was thought they were solid, but over time we learned they were composed of trillions of small icy particles, all orbiting the planet independently.

In this image (and you really need to go grab the bigger version), which is a composite of many images stitched together into a mosaic, the full extent of the rings is shown. Scientists can learn the composition, size, and shape of the particles in the rings by examining images like this. Different particles scatter light differently, distinguishing them.

One of the aspects of science that I find amazing, and that I truly love, is that we can learn so much about nature from images like this, but it also has an enormous and unavoidable appeal to our sense of beauty, our sense of awe. There is a greatness in science that so many people miss. I think we could all use more images like this in our lives. They would give us a sense of perspective.