The pictures of Saturn may seem very pretty, but when you look closely, you may get flummoxed that it has no stars. Where did they disappear? Or were they there at all?
Scientists aver that the stars do exist on Saturn. However, the reason why you can see no stars is that the rings are glowing brightly, which throws the rest of the planet into darkness.
Shooting photographs of Saturn with Cassini's Saturn-orbiting camera brings scientists up against peculiar issues. In the same frame, they try to include both the rings and stars, which illumines the camera too much.
In order to photograph only the rings, photographers can harness "a shorter exposure time". However, that also does not include the less-bright stars in the frame. Saturn's moons around it are so bright that the stars in its frame are not visible.
The image above shows Dione (698 miles, 1123 kilometers across) and Epimetheus (70 miles, 113 kilometers across) above the rings at the left and right of Saturn.
You can see that the planet looks towards the sunlit side of the rings from about 3 degrees above the ring plane. It was clicked in with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on April 2, 2016.
"The Cassini mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (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 mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado," explains NASA.
It was only in 2008 that Cassini managed to shoot a picture of Saturn's moon Enceladus, with visible stars in the background. However, the moon went into eclipse at that time.
