[X] My Assistant

[Tman]

On November 29, 2005, Cassini shot a nice sequence from an "encounter" of Janus and Epimetheus. In this sequence also appear few stars - two brighter and three quite faint. But first I was only stumbled across one of the brighter in this GIF animation: http://www.greuti.ch/cassini/fb_epimetheus_n00043503-36.gif (large file (1,4 MB))

Tilmann was able to identify this spot as UCAC2-30620769 (or HD 217167)
So it was easy to find a picture of the starfield where the two moons of Saturn were in front of at this time - and to make a nice (fictive) animation with the cutted moons: (500 KB) http://www.greuti.ch/cassini/epimetheus_janus_starfield.gif

To show how exact the orientation could be, additionally two images that show the position of the visible stars in the Cassini pictures at the beginning and at the end of the GIF animation (each time the entire picture/frame of Cassini overlay (30% transparent) the picture of the starfield):
http://www.greuti.ch/cassini/epimetheus_ja...eld_marked2.jpg
http://www.greuti.ch/cassini/epimetheus_ja...ield_marked.jpg

Nico (SigurRosFan) still made a nice picture of it with some labeled features of the starfield:

[SigurRosFan]

A new (bigger) version. Enjoy it!

Small galaxies, big moons:

[antoniseb]

A new (bigger) version. Enjoy it!

This is a very nice image. I've posted a link to it in my low-readership journal. If you'd like me to break the link to minimize traffic to your site let me know, and I'll do it ASAP.

BTW, I did a quick look for any color, higher resolution images of Arp 314 and came up empty. Does any one know of a good image of this pair?

Happy Johannes Kepler's 434rd Birthday.