Can You Find Venus Hiding Inside Saturn’s Rings?

Can You Find Venus Hiding Inside Saturn’s Rings?


If you’re looking at the picture above and now checking your screen to see if you have a dead pixel, don’t worry, you don’t. That’s just Venus hiding through Saturn’s rings. Taken by the Cassini, Earth’s twin planet looks like a blinding white speck of dust.

NASA says the picture was captured approximately 801,500 kilometres from Saturn at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft angle of 178 degrees. Each pixel is roughly about 45 kilometres. NASA describes the image:

One special image of Venus and Saturn was taken last November when Cassini was placed in the shadow of Saturn. This allowed Cassini to look in the direction of the sun and Venus, and take a backlit image of Saturn and its rings in a particular viewing geometry called “high solar phase.” This observing position reveals details about the rings and Saturn’s atmosphere that cannot be seen in lower solar phase.

[NASA]


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