Outer Space from Sander van den Berg on Vimeo.

If you follow this blog on any basis, you might be well aware that a good percentage of the imagery is provided by our good flickr friend Gordan Ugarkovic. Here is a bit of what we missed from him in the last 10 months we were locked out.

Titan at the edge of Saturn taken 2011-05-21. Looks unreal. Like Titan was dropped into the scene using Photoshop. A sin I would never commit. See the lesser “official” NASA version released a few months back here.

Keeping with the theme of moons transiting Saturn. Here is Rhea and tiny Epimetheus doing what they do. Taken in 2010-03-24.

Finally, just to change it up… two moons against Titan, another of Saturn’s moons. Pictured above the Titanian cloud-tops is Dione on the left and Rhea on the right.

Space enthusiasts seem to really like shots that have more than one body in the same frame. How about five… or six (if you count the rings of Saturn)? Starting left to right that is Janus, Pandora, Enceladus, Mimas and Rhea.

Thanks again to Gordan Ugarkovic.

Brought (as always) to us from Gordan Ugarkovic.

Wow. That is quite a mutual event. Saturn crescent haze about as dramatic as it is ever seen by Cassini but with the addition of an active Enceladus hanging above at such a scale is quite unreal. Color by Gordan Ugarkovic.

Taken in January of 2011 this raw image reveals Enceladus actively spraying the heavens from its southern geysers.

The Saturnian moon Mimas wanders into the frame of this shot which was primarily observing the active geysers on Enceladus.

This is the best lit image taken of the plumes of Enceladus thus far by Cassini. The moon is lit from the front by Saturnshine and the plumes are being back-lit by the Sun directly behind. A perfect alignment for revealing active geysers on a small moon.

This image is taken directly from the Cassini raw images directory. Sometimes they are perfect with no need for adjustment or correction. The best detail is the subtle haze of the geysers spewing on the right edge. Taken April 26 from 987,839 kilometers away.

This composite has been kicked around a bunch on unmannedspaceflight.com. Contained within it are two separate images taken by the Cassini mission at nearly the same time but different exposures. Looking at this scene with human eyes, the big difference would likely be that the geysers would not be blown out and would look more like a multiple of gentle hazes spewing upward. The other big difference would be that you were somehow on a mission to Saturn and not browsing the web.

Above are the two original exposures. These were merely combined with a photo editing tool. The geyser haze was blurred in areas to clean out compression artifacts and the color was artistically added by Gordan Ugarkovic. While the color is artificially generated, it does accurately reflect the same overall appearance of most natural light images of Titan.

Gordan of course.

This has to be one of the greatest, most alien images ever taken from robotic spacecraft. It approaches how I might expect Enceladus to be depicted if it were in a Star Trek movie. As if the plumes at the edge of the disk back-lit by the Sun were not enough… the trail of smaller plumes breaking through the darkness is absolutely fantastic. The above is a real image but the color is an artistic interpretation by someone would know. Considering how little color is usually found at Enceladus, we can image this is really as good as if it were compiled from a full RGB set of filters. A larger monotone of the same image here.

This image was compiled by Astro0 on unmannedspaceflight.com. Also one of the best views staring down the length of one of Enceladus’ “tiger stripes”.

Ever so sharp look straight down on the South Pole of Enceladus from 1,855 km.

Like the Saturnshine image posted earlier, this is only an estimation of a true color image. Five sources were used to compile this image; clear 1, clear 2, red, blue and another clear filtered image was used to replace the missing green to round it out (this work by S_Walker from unmannedspaceflight.com). We then additionally cleaned out artifacts from the original images and blurred the surrounding geyser haze largely to eliminate posterization noise.

This is the first time anyone has been able to attempt a true color view of the geysers with the availability of the red and blue images. Also a bonus is the considerable amount of Saturnshine seen on the dark side of the moon.

More coming. Looks like a nice encounter.