Astronomy Picture of the Day 06-20-04

Explanation: Season's greetings! Today or tomorrow, depending on your time zone, the Sun reaches its northernmost point in planet Earth's sky marking a season change and the first solstice of the year 2004. In celebration, consider this delightfully detailed, brightly colored image of the active Sun. From the EIT instrument onboard the space-based SOHO observatory, the tantalizing picture is a false-color composite of three images all made in extreme ultraviolet light. Each individual image highlights a different temperature regime in the upper solar atmosphere and was assigned a specific color; red at 2 million, green at 1.5 million, and blue at 1 million degrees C. The combined image shows bright active regions strewn across the solar disk, which would otherwise appear as dark groups of sunspots in visible light images, along with some magnificent plasma loops and an immense prominence at the right hand solar limb.

A couple of years back, the SOHO site put up an array of fascinating solar images. They then asked readers to vote on their favorite of 20 or so images. This very one in the above article was the winner.

Saturn in infrared
CASSINI PHOTO RELEASE
Posted: June 18, 2004

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Download larger image version here

Saturn's bright equatorial band displays an exquisite swirl near the planet's eastern limb. This image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft's narrow angle camera on May 18, 2004, from a distance of 23.4 million kilometers (14.5 million miles) from Saturn.

The camera used a filter sensitive to absorption and scattering of sunlight by methane gas in the infrared (centered at 889 nanometers).

The image scale is 139 kilometers (86 miles) per pixel.

No contrast enhancement has been performed on this image.

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 Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras, were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.

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