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Tower Angle
Published:
December 9, 2004
Tower Angle
ENLARGE
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Cassini gazes across the icy rings of Saturn toward the icy moon Tethys, whose night side is illuminated by Saturnshine, or sunlight reflected by the planet.
Saturn-lit Tethys
Saturn's small, irregularly shaped moon Helene is strikingly illuminated in this close view captured by Cassini during the spacecraft's June 18, 2011, flyby. Although it is not visible at this exp...
Dramatic Helene
Rippling with detail, the southern hemisphere of Saturn comes to life in this view from the Cassini spacecraft. Long, flowing streamers and bands of great contrast soften toward the pole, where a g...
Rivers of Cloud
Saturn's shadow cuts sharply across the rings in this remarkable night side view. The planet's northern latitudes are in darkness in the upper portion of this scene, while the southern reaches are...
The Beauty of Night
The northern polar region of Saturn's moon Tethys seen in this Cassini flyby image is a ponderously ancient surface. Above the prominent peaked crater Telemachus are the remnants of a very old cra...
Old Northern Terrains
Herding the Rings September 21, 2004 Full-Res: PIA06481 Saturn's moon Prometheus is seen shephe...
Herding the Rings
The crater on asteroid Vesta shown in this image from NASA's Dawn spacecraft was emplaced onto the ejecta blanket of two large twin craters. Commonly, rays from impact craters are brighter than the...
Fresh Dark Ray Crater
A pair of moons and a pair of moon shadows can be seen in this Cassini spacecraft image taken about a month and a half after Saturn's August 2009 equinox. Pan (28 kilometers, or 17 miles across) o...
Two Pairs
NASA's Cassini spacecraft successfully completed its Oct. 1 flyby of Saturn's moon Enceladus, capturing these raw, unprocessed images of the moon and its dramatic plumes of water vapor and ice. Th...
Enceladus Flyby E-14 (Raw Image #2)
This image was taken during Cassini's third close approach to Titan on Feb. 15, 2005. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera, through a filter sensitive to wavelengths...
Close Titan Flyby 3, Image #1
The F ring shepherd moon Prometheus touches the face of Saturn once more before moving off into blackness and continuing in its orbit.
Prometheus Makes Contact
From a distance Saturn seems to exude an aura of serenity and peace.
Serene Saturn
These four images of Jupiter and the luminous night-side impact of fragment W of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 were taken by the Galileo spacecraft on July 22, 1994.
Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 Fragment W Impact With Jupiter
Following Cassini's highly successful flyby of Iapetus in September 2007, the spacecraft repeatedly glanced back at the two-toned moon for some time. As Cassini receded from Iapetus, more and more ...
Flyby Follow-up
Saturn's little moon Atlas orbits Saturn between the outer edge of the A ring and the fascinating, twisted F ring. This image just barely resolves the disk of Atlas, and also shows some of the knot...
A Glimpse of Atlas
Saturn's shepherd moon Prometheus reveals its elongated, irregular form to Cassini in this image. The moon's long axis points toward Saturn. Prometheus is 102 kilometers (63 miles) across. This vi...
Lumpy Prometheus
This image of Triton was taken from a distance of about 130,000 kilometers (80,000 miles) at 12:20 a.m. PDT Aug. 25 1989.
Triton Faults
+ View Movie (Closed captioned, QuickTime, 43.4 MB) + View Movie (QuickTime, 29.9 MB) + More Viewing Options A Cassini scientist, Dr. Andy Ingersoll, explains the flickering "northern lights" h...
Saturn's Aurora in a New Light
Pan may be small as satellites go, but like many of Saturn's ring moons, it has a very visible effect on the rings.
Where the Small Moon Rules
Saturn's rings throw imposing shadows and relegate parts of the planet's northern regions to darkness. Three thin and bright arcs in this scene represent three well-known gaps in the immense ring s...
Gaps in the Darkness
Saturn's moon Mimas peeps out from behind the larger moon Dione in this view from the Cassini spacecraft. Mimas (246 miles, or 396 kilometers across) is near the bottom center of the image. Saturn...
Peeping Mimas
This view of Saturn's moon Rhea includes two large and ancient impact basins and a more recent, bright ray crater. The large basin above center is named Tirawa. This feature (and the similar-size...
Crater Comparison
NASA's Dawn spacecraft views Kupalo Crater in this view of Ceres. Kupalo, which measures 16 miles (26 kilometers) across and is located at southern mid-latitudes, is named for the Slavic god of veg...
Dawn LAMO Image 182
Cassini spies a shadow cast by a vertically extended structure or object in the F ring in this image taken as Saturn approaches its August 2009 equinox. The structure can be seen as a bulge near t...
Shadows in the F Ring
This color picture of Antarctica is one part of a mosaic of pictures covering the entire Antarctic continent taken during the hours following Galileo's historic first encounter with its home planet...
Earth - Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica
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