The Saturn moon Iapetus. I don't have a larger version of this, sorry. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

I had hoped to post one of my images from last night however things didn’t work out like I wanted. Apparently my scope has moved, kind of twisted so north is off and I also suspect the scope is no longer level.  It is possible the floor shifted, the roof didn’t really roll off as easily as it could have – frost will do that.You can imagine these things really mess up any notion of astrophotography.

I need to figure out exactly what is going on and correct it. Plenty of time, appears like it will rain for the next week. It will be a good opportunity to get things tidy too.

The Caption from the Cassini website:

Only a slice of Iapetus is illuminated in this image, but still the Cassini spacecraft spies the distinctive two-tone surface of this distant Saturnian moon.

Lit terrain seen here is on the leading hemisphere of Iapetus (1,471 kilometers, or 914 miles across). North on Iapetus is up and rotated 13 degrees to the left.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 2.7 million kilometers (1.7 million miles) from Iapetus and at a Sun-Iapetus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 111 degrees. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 3, 2009. Image scale is 16 kilometers (10 miles) per pixel.