File:Quadruple Saturn Moon Transit Snapped By Hubble (27950259851).jpg
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On February 24, 2009, the Hubble Space Telescope took a photo of four moons of Saturn passing in front of their parent planet. In this view, the giant orange moon Titan casts a large shadow onto Saturn's north polar hood. Below Titan, near the ring plane and to the left is the moon Mimas, casting a much smaller shadow onto Saturn's equatorial cloud tops. Farther to the left, and off Saturn's disk, are the bright moon Dione and the fainter moon Enceladus. These rare moon transits only happen when the tilt of Saturn's ring plane is nearly "edge on" as seen from Earth. Saturn's rings were perfectly edge on to our line of sight on August 10, 2009, and September 4, 2009. This "ring plane crossing" occurs every 14-15 years. In 1995-96 Hubble witnessed the ring plane crossing event, as well as many moon transits, and even helped discover several new moons of Saturn. The banded structure in Saturn's atmosphere is similar to Jupiter's. Early 2009 was a favorable time for viewers with small telescopes to watch moon and shadow transits crossing the face of Saturn. Titan, Saturn's largest moon, crossed Saturn on four separate occasions: January 24, February 9, February 24, and March 12, although not all events were visible from all locations on Earth. These pictures were taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on February 24, 2009, when Saturn was at a distance of roughly 775 million miles (1.25 billion kilometers) from Earth. Hubble can see details as small as 190 miles (300 km) across on Saturn. The dark band running across the face of the planet slightly above the rings is the shadow of the rings cast on the planet. For more information, visit: hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2009-12 Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Acknowledgment: M.H. Wong (STScI/UC Berkeley) and C. Go (Philippines) |
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| Source | Quadruple Saturn Moon Transit Snapped By Hubble |
| Author | NASA Hubble Space Telescope |
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This file is in the public domain because it was created by NASA and ESA. NASA Hubble material (and ESA Hubble material prior to 2009) is copyright-free and may be freely used as in the public domain without fee, on the condition that only NASA, STScI, and/or ESA is credited as the source of the material. This license does not apply if ESA material created after 2008 or source material from other organizations is in use. The material was created for NASA by Space Telescope Science Institute under Contract NAS5-26555, or for ESA by the Hubble European Space Agency Information Centre. Copyright statement at hubblesite.org or 2008 copyright statement at spacetelescope.org. For material created by the European Space Agency on the spacetelescope.org site since 2009, use the {{ESA-Hubble}} tag. |
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This image was originally posted to Flickr by NASA Hubble at https://flickr.com/photos/144614754@N02/27950259851 (archive). It was reviewed on 13 July 2018 by FlickreviewR 2 and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0. |
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| current | 15:49, 13 July 2018 | | 2,860 × 1,957 (597 KB) | Hiàn (alt) (talk | contribs) | Transferred from Flickr via #flickr2commons |
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