Verna and Bob's Weblog

When I surfed over to the Astronomy Picture of the Day this morning, I saw this 3D image of Helene, one of the moons orbiting Saturn.

I grabbed my pair of 3D glasses and saw what this moon would look like if you could see it in stereo. I thought it would be nice to archive it with the 3D stuff and to share it. Of course, if you don’t have a pair of 3D glasses handy, you can view the 2D image here.

This is the technobabble blurb from APOD:

Get out your red/blue glasses and float next to Helene, small, icy moon of Saturn. Appropriately named, Helene is one of four known Trojan moons, so called because it orbits at a Lagrange point. A Lagrange point is a gravitationally stable position near two massive bodies, in this case Saturn and larger moon Dione. In fact, irregularly shaped ( about 36 by 32 by 30 kilometers) Helene orbits at Dione’s leading Lagrange point while brotherly ice moon Polydeuces follows at Dione’s trailing Lagrange point. The sharp stereo anaglyph was constructed from two Cassini images (N00172886, N00172892) captured during the recent close flyby. It shows part of the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Helene mottled with craters and gully-like features.