Cassini Confirms New Moon of Saturn

pipcorona writes ""In a spectacular kick-off to its first season of prime ring viewing, which began last month, the Cassini spacecraft has confirmed earlier suspicions of an unseen moon hidden in a gap in Saturn's outer A ring. A new image and movie show the new moon and the waves it raises in the surrounding ring material."

Comments

Re:In space no one can see your color?

[Mikey-San]

Imagine being in England for a moment. It's 3 a.m., and you're sitting on one side of the Thames River.

Your friend Bob is perched in his chair on the other side.

Your camera's all set up and ready to snap a picture. Just when you're about to snap, you realize that the nearest streetlight is three miles to Bob's left. Seeing that the Thames isn't a sneeze's distance across, you know that the dinky flash on your camera is pretty useless.

You whip out your trusty imaging spectrometer camera lens and line up the shot with Bob again. Bob's giving off some good x-ray emissions, and those come across just fine.

You could've used a really, really awesome lens and captured a bad photo of Bob--he still reflects some light, though it's a ridiculously small amount--but the IR lens gave you a more descriptive picture of Bob. Why? Mr Bob the Planet Man doesn't give off his own visible light, but he certainly emits x-rays on his own.

This scales higher:

In this new-but-similar scenario, you're flying over England. You're trying to take a picture of Bob and his lazy ass, but all you can see, no matter how much light you shine down onto the city below, are the lights from the buildings, bridges, and streetlamps. There's just too much noise to find ol' Bob in that galaxy of lumens.

You've got all these lights shining on Bob, but unlike the first scenario, there's /too much/ light to see Bob; all you see are stars, so to speak, drowning out the nearby planets. Well, in x-ray mode, your camera can see that while those stars are emitting x-rays, so is Bob, just like before. You're not seeing a faint image of Bob drowned out by the only light illuminating him, you see Bob's x-ray signature approximately ten feet to the right of that cluster of streetligts.

The universe is a dark place, but sometimes it can be TOO bright! It's a good thing I remembered a towel!