Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2017

30 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2017 SATURN Saturn's northern hemisphere in 2016 Cassini scanned across the planet and its rings on April 25, 2016, capturing three sets of red, green and blue images to cover this en- tire scene showing the planet and the main rings. The images were obtained using Cassini's wide-angle camera at a dis- tance of approximately 3 million kilometers from Saturn and at an elevation of about 30 degrees above the ring plane. The view looks to- ward the sunlit side of the rings from a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft angle of 55 degrees. Image scale on Saturn is about 178 kilometers per pixel. [NASA/JPL/ Space Science Institute]