Ready for another Where In The Universe Challenge? Here’s #128! Take a look and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. As usual, we’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until later. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Please, no links or extensive explanations of what you think this is — give everyone the chance to guess.
UPDATE: Answer now published below!
This is Saturn’s F-ring, as seen by Voyager 1 on November 12, 1980. Of course we have better, higher resolution images of the F-ring from Cassini, but this was our first close-up glimpse of this strange, two-strand braided rings. Voyager 1 took the image at a distance of about 750,000 km.
See more images from the Voyager mission at this link from NASA.
Check back next week for another test of your visual knowledge of the cosmos!
Saturn’s F Ring – I think it’s the original Voyager picture, though I can’t say which Voyager without looking it up.
A gray hair that fell off of my head and onto my black suit pants. Taken by my EnV3 cell phone five minutes ago. I traveled back in time to plant the picture, but I wasn’t dumb enough to have my picture taken while walking in front of a famous site while talking on my phone that didn’t exist at the time.
Saturn’s F ring by Cassini
Yes Voyager 1, about 1980.
Saturn’s F-ring by Voyager 1, November 1980. I think at that time they referred to it as a braided ring,
This looks like a thread of some sorts, caught in front of a telescope lens. No actually a microscope lens!
The world indeed hosts any possibility.
That’s the F ring! No doubt. Not by Cassini though, must be Voyager 1.
Yep – Looks like the funny F ring of Saturn.
Looks like Neptune’s ring to me but this perspective does not look symmetrical.
A not-so-sharp picture by the Apollo 8 crew of the moon. They had just emerged from the shadow.
O.K., I admit I didn’t travel through time to plant a picture of my gray hair on my black pants.
It is most certainly Saturn’s F ring and it was definitely taken by Voyager 1 spacecraft.