The Hubble Space Telescope captured an amazing photo of Saturn earlier this month. The photograph clearly shows Saturn, but Saturn’s two satellites were intruders in the photograph.
Hubble Space Telescope has added a new one to the magnificent photographs it has obtained over its 30-year term. Hubble, which continues to follow the Solar System and other galaxies in its orbit 547 km from the earth, managed to take a very clear photograph of Saturn, the second largest planet in the Solar System earlier this month.
Saturn, which is 1.35 billion kilometers from Earth, is the 6th closest planet to the Sun. As you can see in the photo, Saturn’s northern hemisphere is now facing the Sun, indicating that the summer season is happening in the north of the planet. Of course, this summer season is a little (!) Different than on Earth.
Saturn photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope
Saturn is located almost ten times further from the Earth than the Earth (the distance between Earth and Sun is 150 million kilometers). Therefore, the heating caused by sunlight in the gas giant is extremely minimal and the average temperature of Saturn is at -178 degrees Celsius.
If you look carefully at the photo Hubble has obtained, you can see that there are small white dots on the right and bottom of the planet. The dot on the right is Mimas, one of Saturn’s 82 satellites, and the dot on the bottom is Enceladus, another satellite of Saturn. Unfortunately, these two satellites do not appear as clearly as Saturn.
Where are the stars?
When a planet hundreds of millions of kilometers away is so clearly photographed, you can question why not a single star appears and think the photo is fake. The truth is that Hubble, a 30-year-old telescope and cameras are even more primitive than today’s smartphone cameras.
When photographing planets or stars, telescopes set high exposure values, so subjects with relatively low brightness, such as distant stars, do not appear in the photos. As an example, we can show that there is not a single star in most of the Earth photos taken from the International Space Station.
