Navigations are at the top.
saturn taken from earth....
this beautiful image is from the recent nasa mission cassini, the orbiter around saturn... Back to the observing log......Hi all!! Due to the examinations, i only managed to find time to do this lesson. Although i'm supposed to start with Jupiter, i shall start with his smaller, flashier cousin, saturn, with the title " lord of the rings" to boot. Today, topic will be on saturn's beautiful rings that can be seen in even the most modest of telescopes, and the ever-increasing number of 63+ natural satellites Saturn's main satellites(moons) can be divided to several portions: inner large moons, outer large moons, shepard moons, irregular moons and moonlets. For the inner moons we have Mimas(looks similar to the death star in star wars), Enceladus, Tethys and Dione. Outer large moons include Rhea, Titan, Hyperion and Iapetus. Shepard moons include Prometheus, Pandora, Pan and Atlas and several others i won't bother to list... Irregular tiny moons make up the rest of saturn's vast number of moons, the largest of all is the oddball Phoebe, a captured asteroid(maybe). 
Mimas, the innermost big moon of saturn, has this huge crater sticking out... the shot could had killed it. look for similarities with the death star of star wars in the pic below....
nice issit?
Enceladus
notice how bright this guy is? its because of the possible liquid ice underneath a surface of solid ice reflects alot of light back at us! This moon is said to have sprouted the microscopic particles for saturn's E ring(discussed later)
Look at this giant shallow crater! Tethys almost suffered the same fate as mimas, crater named oddysseus is 2/5 the diameter of this moon! heavily cratered, it is a typical moon of saturn with a twist: the moon has a giant rift not shown in this picture called Ithaca Chasma
many knows the biscuit called dione, this rocky cookie is dione, a moon of saturn! the wispy surface details are a highlight of this moon, but still heavily cratered like the others
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.....
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
stargazing again at[5/12/2008 07:09:00 PM]
