Tag: Enceladus

Today Is: Saturn’s Day – Day of Seatere, Seater, and Saturn and of Loki, the Norse god of tricks and revelry

Days Of The Week Comments 

Today Is: Saturn’s Day – Day of Seatere, Seater, and Saturn and of Loki, the Norse god of tricks and revelry. Saturday is ruled by Saturn, whose Magickal influences are: longevity, endings, and homes. Saturday comes under the influence of Saturn. Saturn’s influence directs our attention toward routine chores, customs, and conventional traditions. Saturday is a good day for furthering our ambitions through perseverance, patience, responsible action, and a sense of purpose . Saturday is a good day of the week to perform spells and rituals involving spirit communication, meditation, psychic self-defense, binding, and locating lost things or missing persons.

Today’s Goddesses: Ops, Rhea, Tellus Mater, Gaia, Eartha, Ge, Tonantzin, Asherah, Anath, The Shekinah, The Matronit, Mary, Gala, Herodias, Oddudua, Demeter

Today’s Magickal Influences: Duties, Responsibilities, Finding Families, Works Of Magic, Buildings, Meditation, Life, Doctrines

Today’s Energies: Female – Rules obstacles, overcoming blockages – Use for magick involving overcoming limitations, the elderly, endings, deaths, blocks, constrictions, and those restricting you.

Incense: Pepperwort, Assodilious, Black Poppy Seeds, Henbane, Lodestone, Myrrh

Perfumes: Hyacinth, Pansy

Color of The Day: Black

Colors for Tomorrow: Orange, Gold and Yellow

Lucky Sign: Saturday Is The Lucky Day For Capricorn And Aquarius

Candle: Black

 

References:

GrannyMoonsMorningFeast

Magickal Graphics

Astronomy Picture of the Day for February 8

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos!Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2012 February 8
See Explanation. Clicking on the picture will download the highest resolution version available.

Enceladus Backlit by Saturn
Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA; Color Composite: Gordan Ugarkovic 

Explanation: This moon is shining by the light of its planet. Specifically, a large portion of Enceladus pictured above is illuminated primarily by sunlight first reflected from the planet Saturn. The result is that the normally snow-white moon appears in the gold color of Saturn’s cloud tops. As most of the illumination comes from the image left, a labyrinth of ridges throws notable shadows just to the right of the image center, while the kilometer-deep canyon Labtayt Sulci is visible just below. The bright thin crescent on the far right is the only part of Enceladus directly lit by the Sun. The above image was taken last year by the robotic Cassini spacecraft during a close pass by by the enigmatic moon. Inspection of the lower part of this digitally sharpened image reveals plumes of ice crystals thought to originate in a below-surface sea.

NASA Image of the Day for November 18th – Saturn’s Northern Storm

S Saturn

Saturn’s Northern Storm

This false-color mosaic from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows the tail of Saturn’s huge northern storm. In mid-September 2004, the Cassini spacecraft chronicled a similar, but smaller, storm in the southern hemisphere called the “Dragon Storm.”

The head of this storm is beyond the horizon in this view. Saturn’s atmosphere and its rings are shown here in a false color composite made from 12 images taken in near-infrared light through filters that are sensitive to varying degrees of methane absorption. Red and orange colors in this view indicate clouds that are deep in the atmosphere. Yellow and green colors, most noticeable near the top of the view, indicate intermediate clouds. White and blue indicate high clouds and haze. The rings appear as a thin horizontal line of bright blue because they are outside of the atmosphere and not affected by methane absorption.

The oval in the upper left of this image that appears slightly blue is the same hole in the deep clouds of the planet’s atmosphere that can be seen near the tail in a larger false-color mosaic, PIA14903. The blue color comes from the high haze overlying the hole.

This view looks toward the northern, sunlit side of the rings from just above the ring plane. The shadow of the moon Enceladus is visible on the planet in the lower left of the image.

The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light. The images filtered at 890 nanometers are projected as blue. The images filtered at 728 nanometers are projected as green, and images filtered at 752 nanometers are projected as red.

The images were taken on Jan. 12, 2011, over about one hour at a distance of approximately 684,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 52 degrees. The images were re-projected to the same viewing geometry, so that scale in this final mosaic is 76 miles (122 kilometers) per pixel.

Image Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

NASA Image of the Day for October 10th

Electrical Circuit Between Saturn and Enceladus

This artist’s concept shows a glowing patch of ultraviolet light near Saturn’s north pole that occurs at the “footprint” of the magnetic connection between Saturn and its moon Enceladus. The footprint and magnetic field lines are not visible to the naked eye, but were detected by the ultraviolet imaging spectrograph and the fields and particles instruments on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. The footprint, newly discovered by Cassini, marks the presence of an electrical circuit that connects Saturn with Enceladus and accelerates electrons and ions along the magnetic field lines. In this image, the footprint is in the white box marked on Saturn, with the magnetic field lines in white and purple.

A larger white square above Enceladus shows a cross-section of the magnetic field line between the moon and the planet. This pattern of energetic protons was detected by Cassini’s magnetospheric imaging instrument (MIMI) on Aug. 11, 2008.

The patch near Saturn’s north pole glows because of the same phenomenon that makes Saturn’s well-known north and south polar auroras glow: energetic electrons diving into the planet’s atmosphere. However, the “footprint” is not connected to the rings of auroras around Saturn’s poles (shown as an orange ring around the north pole in this image).

The Cassini plasma spectrometer complemented the MIMI data, with detection of field-aligned electron beams in the area. A team of scientists analyzed the charged particle data and concluded that the electron beams had sufficient energy flux to generate a detectable level of auroral emission at Saturn. Target locations were provided to Cassini’s ultraviolet imaging spectrograph team. On Aug. 26, 2008, the spectrograph obtained images of an auroral footprint in Saturn’s northern hemisphere.

The newly discovered auroral footprint measured about 1,200 kilometers (750 miles) in the longitude direction and less than 400 kilometers (250 miles) in latitude, covering an area comparable to that of California or Sweden. It was located at about 65 degrees north latitude.

In the brightest image the footprint shone with an ultraviolet light intensity of about 1.6 kilorayleighs, far less than the Saturnian polar auroral rings. This is comparable to the faintest aurora visible at Earth without a telescope in the visible light spectrum. Scientists have not yet found a matching footprint at the southern end of the magnetic field line.

The background star field and false color images of Saturn and Enceladus were obtained by Cassini’s imaging science subsystem.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The ultraviolet imaging spectrograph team is based at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The magnetospheric imaging team is based at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md. The Cassini plasma spectrometer team is based at the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini .

Image credit: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/University of Colorado/Central Arizona College/SSI

 
 

NASA Image of the Day for October 1st

Saturn’s Silhouetted Clouds

This false-color mosaic shows deep-level clouds silhouetted against Saturn’s glowing interior. This mosaic shows the entire planet, including features like Saturn’s ring shadows and the terminator, the boundary between day and night.

The blue-green color (lower right) is sunlight scattered off clouds high in Saturn’s atmosphere and the red color (upper left) is the glow of thermal radiation from Saturn’s warm interior, easily seen on Saturn’s night side (top left), within the shadow of the rings, and with somewhat less contrast on Saturn’s day side (bottom right). The darker areas within Saturn show the strongest thermal radiation. The bright red color indicates areas where Saturn’s atmosphere is relatively clear. The great variety of cloud shapes and sizes reveals a surprisingly active planet below the overlying sun-scattering haze.

The brighter glow of the northern hemisphere versus the southern indicates that the clouds and hazes there are noticeably thinner than those in the south. Scientists speculate that this is a seasonal effect, and if so, it will change as the northern hemisphere enters springtime during the next few years.

The data were obtained in February 2006 at a distance of 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from directly over the plane of Saturn’s rings, which appear here as a thin, blue line over the equator.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Astronomy Picture of the Day for Sept. 4th

 Astronomy Picture of the Day 

Discover the cosmos!Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

 2011 September 4

 In the Shadow of Saturn
Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA

Explanation: In the shadow of Saturn, unexpected wonders appear. The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn drifted in giant planet’s shadow for about 12 hours in 2006 and looked back toward the eclipsed Sun. Cassini saw a view unlike any other. First, the night side of Saturn is seen to be partly lit by light reflected from its own majestic ring system. Next, the rings themselves appear dark when silhouetted against Saturn, but quite bright when viewed away from Saturn, slightly scattering sunlight, in this exaggerated color image. Saturn’s rings light up so much that new rings were discovered, although they are hard to see in the image. Seen in spectacular detail, however, is Saturn’s E ring, the ring created by the newly discovered ice-fountains of the moon Enceladus and the outermost ring visible above. Far in the distance, at the left, just above the bright main rings, is the almost ignorable pale blue dot of Earth.