Dione and Saturn and an almost invisible ring

Filed under pretty pictures, global views, many worlds, amateur image processing, Saturn, Saturn's moons, Saturn's rings, Dione, Cassini

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Dione and Saturn and an almost invisible ring

An infrared-green-violet approximate true-color composite of Dione poised in front of Saturn on December 13, 2011. Cassini is almost precisely in the ring plane, so the rings are vanishingly thin.

NASA / JPL / SSI / Emily Lakdawalla

Original images: W1702383418_1 - W1702383473_1 - W1702383528_1

Processing for this image involved separately aligning the three images on Dione and on Saturn, and presenting the result in the positions the two bodies occupied in the infrared-filter image. Because the range from Cassini to Dione changed noticeably between the acquisition of the three images, resizing was also required for the Dione composite. Resizing was not required for Saturn.

Copyright holder: Emily Lakdawalla

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder. Original image data dated on or about December 13, 2011