Rhea, the second largest moon in the saturnian system. its surface is similar to dione, with wispy surface markings and heavily cratered, but bigger.

Titan, the largest moon of saturn and second largest moon of the solar system, bigger than mercury and pluto(not a planet now=P), has a thick orange atmosphere containing methane and other organic molecules. Seas of other higher hydrocarbons are predicted.

Cassini-Huygens space probe launched in 1997 lands Huygens onto the titanian surface, and only to see something like this:

tag to give your views

Hyperion! this holey potato got its shape from a explaination that it was blasted into bits from a larger satellite, fragments like this became Hyperion. mostly made of dirty water-ice

this strange moon with a strange name, Iapetus is known for one side much darker than the other! a possible explanation is iapetus swept up the fragments from the blown up hyperion mentioned earlier above and got one side dirtied. this is because only one side of this perticular moon faces saturn, like our own moon...

Phoebe, the oddball from the allerged asteroid belt or a stray comet, is highly cratered and strange, rotating in a retrograde orbit(different from other satellites) and taking 550 days to rotate saturn just once...

the D ring, dark and closest to Saturn....
the C ring, can be seen from Earth, this ring is just outside the D ring

the B ring, the brightest and most massive of them all! this beauty is seperated from the A ring by the cassini division.....


the A ring, the outermost ring we puny Earthlings can see, split by the encke gap and stayed on shape by tiny shepard satellites only a few kilometers across...

the F ring is just outside the A ring, kept by two tiny shepard moons named Pandora and Prometheus, watch the animation for ripples in this peculiar ring.....

the G ring is a faint ring outside the F, and is much brighter on the inner edge. this is similar to the rings of neptune O.o

The backlit E ring, with Enceladus silhouetted against it at center. the E ring is the biggest of all, starting from enceladus and extending all the way to rhea. however, these fine rings of microscopic material, F,G and E cannot be seen from earth as they are too dim

Lesson will continue next week....

All astronomy buffs/astronomers, please take note that the next observing session will be at 23rd of may 2008, 7.30pm. For any enquiries, please tag on the blog for questions, or tllm if u go to wikipedia. until then, may the skies be clear for that night=P

Zong Yang=D