Real

Sunday, September 26 2010

It takes a minute for to appreciate that the images below are real. They are not renderings or artist conceptions but actual pictures depicting the state of the universe as seen by the Cassini spacecraft as it encountered Saturn's moon Enceladus (some 900 million miles from Earth) earlier this year.

This first image shows Enceladus as the dark shadow along the bottom with the rings of Saturn above it (viewed in-plane) and the moon Titan behind.

And this movie is not a poorly produced scene from a 1950s sci-fi flick, but the actual view from Cassini on its approach to Enceladus. The plumes are potentially water-rish geysers on the moon's surface.

These images are a couple of months old, but I completely missed them when they were released. It's amazing stuff if you stop to think about what you're actually looking at.