Scale of Saturn of the Day: Sure, everyone knows Saturn is huge, but it’s hard to wrap our heads around how big it is without images like this one, captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. (Embiggen.)
The planet’s surface is in the background, and that line across the middle is Saturn’s rings, seen edge-on. The dark streaks below are their shadows.
Here’s where things get mind-blowing: that tiny dot on the left side of the image, just below the rings, is a moon called Enceladus … and it’s 310 miles across. There’s another, smaller moon called Epimetheus to the left of it — it looks like a minuscule black speck in this image, but it’s actually 70 miles long.
Reading that Saturn is 75,000 miles across is one thing, seeing an image that shows that scale is something else altogether.
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