Moons Of The Moon King

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An image of five Saturnine moons above the ring plane captured in 2011, by the Cassini spacecraft’s narrow-angle camera. To wit:

Left to right are small moons Janus and Pandora respectively 179 and 81 kilometres across, shiny 504 kilometre diameter Enceladus, and Mimas, 396 kilometres across, seen just next to Rhea. Cut off by the right edge of the frame, Rhea is Saturn’s second largest moon at 1,528 kilometres across. So how many moons does Saturn have? Twenty new found outer satellites bring its total to 82 known moons, and since Jupiter’s moon total stands at 79, Saturn is the Solar System’s new moon king. The newly announced Saturnian satellites are all very small, 5 kilometres or so in diameter, and most are in retrograde orbits inclined to Saturn’s ringplane.

(Image: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, NASA )

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11 thoughts on “Moons Of The Moon King

  1. Slightly Bemused

    One of the most wonderful aspects of more modern astronomy is the range of fantastic pictures that are now available. Not that the older ones are not, but now we have platforms out there sending back images such as this that could never be caught on an Earthbound telescope.

    Thank you for sharing this, Chompsky!

    1. Liam Deliverance

      @Slightly – Images of places that are 1,892,146,000,000,000,000 km distant from us in the case of the Small Cloud of Magellan, truly marvelous altogether.

        1. Liam Deliverance

          @ V – I sometimes wonder about all the life forms throughout the universe and where we are on the evolutionary scale, most or least advanced? Will we find them or will they find us. I also wonder is there some larger life form out there that loves nothing more than foraging for and scooping up tasty little solar systems and popping them straight into their mouth, crunchy and with a little heat, sometimes getting stuck in their teeth. Like Monster Munch!

        2. Pat

          @V
          To them we look like hairy arsed hunter gatherers because light from here takes 200,000 years to reach them and that’s what we looked like 200,000 years ago

          1. Janet, I ate my Avatar

            busy interbreeding with Neanderthals so we can put tonnes of butter in our spuds today ( lactose tolerance)

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