Thursday, July 20, 2006
Not a Space Snowman
It's Enceladus passing in front of its larger sister Rhea.
In reality they're thousands of miles apart. The bright crescents are sunlight. The glow is planetshine from Saturn. Note the geysers pumping from the south pole of Enceladus. Too bad Star Trek: Voyager was saddled with such a silly premise to get the show off the ground. In the real universe, it's water, water, everywhere. Well, once you find some small moons at about 200 degrees below zero, that is. They seem to outnumber earthlike planets about ninety to one in our neighborhood.
