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Night Side Rings
Saturn casts a wide shadow across its rings in this Cassini spacecraft view which looks toward the darkened southern hemisphere of the night side of the planet.
Does anyone else get all choked up over how mind-shatteringly gorgeous simple ice, rock, and dust can be?
From What are Saturn’s rings made of?
Saturn has six main rings, each composed of thousands of tiny ringlets. The rings are huge — the biggest ones spanning 170,000 miles (273,588 km) in diameter. They are, however, proportionately very thin — only about 650 feet (200 meters) thick. They aren’t solid, as they appear from Earth, but are instead made up of floating chunks of water ice, rocks and dust that range in size from specks to enormous, house-sized pieces that orbit Saturn in a ring pattern. As the particles orbit, they collide constantly, shattering the larger pieces [x].](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9ivbmNOQC1qbn5m1o1_500.jpg)
Saturn casts a wide shadow across its rings in this Cassini spacecraft view which looks toward the darkened southern hemisphere of the night side of the planet.
Does anyone else get all choked up over how mind-shatteringly gorgeous simple ice, rock, and dust can be?
From What are Saturn’s rings made of?
Saturn has six main rings, each composed of thousands of tiny ringlets. The rings are huge — the biggest ones spanning 170,000 miles (273,588 km) in diameter. They are, however, proportionately very thin — only about 650 feet (200 meters) thick. They aren’t solid, as they appear from Earth, but are instead made up of floating chunks of water ice, rocks and dust that range in size from specks to enormous, house-sized pieces that orbit Saturn in a ring pattern. As the particles orbit, they collide constantly, shattering the larger pieces [x].
(Source: kenobi-wan-obi)
