This is the glory of Saturn. Not a CGI movie version, but the real-deal image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn (still!). Saturn is a wonderful sight and our view of it is slowly decreasing this year. It's rings are tilted and this year our orientation to Saturn means that the tilt makes the rings appear almost flat to us.
So no "planet with ears" like Galileo first sketched 400 years ago :D I cannot imagine what he would have said at that moment, but... wow.
Saturn does not look much different today through the telescope - yellow-ish and distinctly "eared", these spacecraft images just make it seem more real. Someday, we will see this majestic gas giant with her beautiful rings in real, 3-D, human eyes. Not mine, I am sure, by remember that in the movie "GATTACA", the hero's dream mission was to be on the launch crew to go to Titan.
In the meantime, we can still dream of it (especially on cloudy nights like this one). Or, if we are frisky, we can try out NASA's 3-D "Where is Cassini Now?" web browser - highly recommended (you do have to install a small 3-D plugin, but it was quick). Well worth it to see Cassini fly-by the moons, flop about to send data back to Earth, and give us a sense of the size of the whole Saturn-ring-moon system. She flies all day and never seems to get close to anything.
Vast and beautiful.
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