Pictures of Saturn
Written by Fraser Cain
Saturn is easily the most beautiful planet in the Solar System. To celebrate this natural wonder, lets look at some pictures of Saturn.
Let's start with one of the most beautiful photos of Saturn ever taken. This image of Saturn was taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft when it was behind Saturn. In other words, the Sun is completely obscured by Saturn, and illuminating it from behind. The tiny speck in the upper, left-hand side of Saturn's rings is our own home planet Earth.
This fantastic photo of Saturn was taken by the ground-based Keck telescope, located atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. It's one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth. The Saturn photo was taken in infrared, and shows the strange hot spot located at Saturn's south pole.
It's not the best picture, but you're looking at one of the first ever images of Saturn captured up close by NASA's Pioneer 11. During its mission, Pioneer 11 passed just 20,000 km above the cloud tops of Saturn, and captured the first close-up images of Saturn.
This is an example of an image of Saturn taken by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1980. As you can see, the quality has improved significantly over the image captured by Pioneer 11. Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 made quick flybys of Saturn and then sped off into space. When Voyager 1 completed its flyby of Saturn, it sped off into the depths of space, while Voyager 2 went on to visit Uranus and Neptune as part of its Grand Tour of the Solar System.
Here's another image of Saturn captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. This photograph was taken in May 2004, when Cassini had almost arrived at Saturn. The spacecraft spent another 4 years orbiting Saturn as part of its primary mission, and at the time of this writing, it's still going strong.
Filed under: Astronomy
