Cassini hi-reses Enceladus

Bad Astronomy
By Phil Plait
Nov 2, 2008 3:02 AMNov 5, 2019 7:12 AM

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I have to go to a birthday party (srsly) so I can't put my usual spin on this, but yesterday Cassini swept over the south pole of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus, snapping away at the active regions of geysering there. The result?

It almost doesn't look real, does it? Click to get to more images, including embiggened ones. This mosaic has a max resolution of 12.3 meters per pixel! Those little round boulders you can see in the (hi-res) image? Yeah, they're not much bigger than a typical house. Just to remind you, Saturn is about 1.5 billion kilometers (920 million miles) away right now. Egads. The things we can do.

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