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Saturn Photos Don't Get Better Than This

Saturn is often a source of spectacular space images, but this one takes the cake.

Saturn is often a source of spectacular space images, but this one takes the cake. Captured by the Cassini spacecraft currently checking out the ringed planet, the photo shows the moon Epithemeus at bottom right as it glides outside Saturn's main rings.

The moon Daphnis, a tiny body only discovered by the Cassini crew in 2005, is also visible if you check out the full-res photo, albeit barely. Because the image has a scale of five miles per pixel, and Daphnis is only about five miles across, the moon is a tiny white dot right and below the center of the image, just inside the black band known as the Keeler Gap.

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According to NASA, the photo was taken in visible light with Cassini's narrow-angle camera back in June. That means that, unlike some false-color and composite images, this photo is kinda close to what the human eye could see—assuming you saw in black and white, and that you could find yourself successfully shooting photos some 808,000 miles from Daphnis, as Cassini did.

So how does one find a celestial body as miniscule as Daphnis? Back in 2005, Cassini imaged the Keeler gap, a space in Saturn's ring system that astronomers thought might be home to a moon. A series of photos found disturbances in the rings that could only be caused by a passing object. Check it out below:

Via Ciclops

Those ripples have become Daphnis's signature, and that a tiny moon could orbit its way through the 25-mile wide Keeler gap is nothing short of astounding. But for all the close ups and wave images of Daphnis, I still can't get past the striking, geometric beauty of the top photo. Space is the stuff of superlatives, but in this case, I'm not sure there are words big enough to describe a photo of Saturn's rings in such sharp relief. Can "whoa, dude" suffice?

@derektmead