Animation of Saturn & its moons (Niall MacNeill)

Contains: Solar system body or event

Animation of Saturn & its moons

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Animation of Saturn & its moons

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

I animated the series of wide field images I made from 7 RGB runs of 90 secs per colour channel on 2019-09-15.

To do this I created a series of aligned stills from the WinJUPOS Ephemerides with the time stamps for each image of the animation. I then successively used these as a template to insert the RGB images of Titan, Rhea, Dione and Tethys and monochrome images of Enceladus and Mimas, into their correct positions. Since the animation includes the image of Saturn for each time frame the planet is rotating as well, per my previous animation, but this is hard to see at this scale.

I hope that the small movement of the moons over approximately 30 minutes, gives you some appreciation of the the orbits of the moons and their wide elliptical shape from our viewing angle.

Clearly Titan at the bottom and Rhea at left above it are behind Saturn and moving from left to right in small arcs. The other moons from left to right in the upper part of the image, Dione, Mimas, Enceladus and Tethys are in front of Saturn and so moving from right to left.

Notice that the innermost moons like Mimas and Enceladus are moving faster in their orbits than those moons further out.

Rhea and Dione are closest to their greatest elongation and so their motions have a significant downward component in the image. Dione is heading towards the point where it will turn behind the planet and start moving back the other way from left to right, whereas Rhea has already done that and has swung around behind Saturn.

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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Animation of Saturn & its moons

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Animation of Saturn & its moons

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