Media Information

 
 
 
Collection:
NASA Planetary Photo Journal Collection
Title:
Flickering Aldebaran #3
Original Caption Released with Image:
Cassini took a series of images on Sept. 9, 2006 as it watched the bright red giant star Aldebaran slip behind Saturn's rings. This type of observation is known as a stellar occultation and uses a star whose brightness is well known. As Cassini watches the rings pass in front, the star's light fluctuates, providing information about the concentrations of ring particles within the various radial features in the rings.

Here, Cassini watches the star through the part of the rings masked by Saturn's shadow. The view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 20 degrees below the ringplane. Bright Aldebaran is over exposed, creating thin vertical lines on its image.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 9, 2006 at a distance of approximately 351,000 kilometers (218,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale on the sky at the distance of Saturn is 2 kilometers (1 mile) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org.
Image Credit:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Produced By:
Cassini Imaging Team
Mission:
Cassini
Spacecraft:
Cassini Orbiter
Target Name:
S Rings
Is a satellite of:
Saturn
Instrument:
Imaging Science Subsystem - Narrow Angle
Product Size:
1014 samples x 596 lines
Primary Data Set:
Cassini
facet_what:
Saturn
facet_what:
Cassini
facet_what:
Visible Light
facet_what:
Cassini Orbiter
facet_what:
Huygens Probe
facet_what:
Cassini-Huygens
facet_what:
ALDEBARAN
facet_what:
Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
facet_where:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
facet_where:
Saturn
facet_where:
California
facet_where:
Washington
facet_where:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
facet_where:
Washington, D.C.
Image #:
PIA08287
UID:
SPD-PHOTJ-PIA08287
orignial url:

Flickering Aldebaran #3