NASA released a stunning image of Saturn and its rings taken by the Cassini spacecraft and put together by Cassini fan Gordan Ugarkovic.
The image isn't perfect, it has not been totally adjusted to take into account spacecraft movement, and the image still contains some "camera artifacts," NASA reported.
The way the image was put together is similar to the way one creates a mosaic.
"The mosaic was created from 12 image footprints with red, blue and green filters from Cassini's imaging science subsystem. Ugarkovic used full color sets for 11 of the footprints and red and blue images for one footprint," NASA reported.
"I try to be measured in my praise for spacecraft images," Emily Lakdawall of the Planetary Society, the first to spot the image on Ugarkovic's Flickr, said, Space.com reported. "But this enormous mosaic showing the flattened globe of Saturn floating amongst the complete disk of its rings must surely be counted among the great images of the Cassini mission."
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and was first spotted by Galileo in the year 1610, Space.com reported.
Early astronomers were stumped by the planet's rings.
"In 1655, astronomer Christaan Huygens suggested that the strange bodies were solid, inclined rings, and in 1660 another astronomer suggested that the rings were made up of small satellites, an insight that wasn't confirmed for nearly 200 years," Space.com reported.
The planet was first observed in modern times by Pioneer 11 in 1979. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 also flew by the planet's rings in the 1980s.
The U.S. made it into Saturn's orbit for the first time in 2004 during NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission. The mission has taken detailed images of both Saturn and its rings.
"Today's @NASA #IOTD: stunning portrait of Saturn: our public raw images processed by a Cassini fan!" The Cassini-Huygens mission tweeted Friday.
