Thar She Blows! Saturn Moon Looks Like Moby Dick

Is it Moby Dick? A potato? H. R. Giger's Alien skull? Looking like a combination of all three of those things, Prometheus, Saturn's moon, appears to float out toward the viewer in this 3-D rendering made by the Cassini spacecraft.

This stereoscopic view is a complementary color anaglyph image, which combines two black-and-white images taken from slightly different angles. By coloring one image red and the other blue, the two images can be combined into one stereo image by the brain of the viewer wearing red-blue glasses. (Glasses not included.)

The viewer is being treated to a view of the leading hemisphere of Prometheus (53 miles, or 86 kilometers, across). North on Prometheus is up and rotated 47 degrees to the right. The end of Prometheus on the lower right points toward Saturn, while the opposite end on the upper left points away from the planet.

The Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera took the images in visible light on Dec. 26, 2009. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 35,000 miles (57,000 kilometers) from Prometheus and at a Sun-Prometheus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 33 degrees.

Cassini launched October 15, 1997, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.

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