Ho-hum. It’s just another GORGEOUS PICTURE OF SATURN’S RINGS!
Holy Haleakala!
The thing is, it’s not just another gorgeous picture. This image — from Cassini, of course — is truly remarkable.
The first thing you should know is that Saturn’s rings are incredibly flat. If you scaled them down to the size of a piece of paper, they’d actually be far thinner than a single sheet of that paper. In fact, even though they’re about 200,000 kilometers across, they are only at most a few dozen meters thick!
But not everywhere.
Daphnis is a teeny tiny moon, just 8 km (5 miles) across. It orbits Saturn inside the broad A ring, and it’s carved a gap in the rings called the Keeler Gap. The gap is about 45 km (25 miles) across. As it happens, Daphnis has an orbit that is not perfectly circular, so sometimes it’s in the middle ...
