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The Music of Pan...The Waves in the Rings...
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Caption NASA:"The Encke Gap displays gentle waves in its inner and outer edges that are caused by gravitational tugs from the small moon Pan. These scalloped edges were captured in a dramatic image taken by Cassini during its insertion into Saturn orbit in 2004.
The Encke Gap is a 325-Km (about 200-mile) wide division in Saturn's outer A-Ring.
Pan (26 Km, or approx. 16 miles across) orbits squarely in the center of this gap.
The original image was stretched in the horizontal direction by a factor of four to exaggerate the amplitude of the waves, then reduced to half size and cropped to focus on the gap.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on July 23, 2006 at a distance of approx. 290.000 Km(such as about 180.000 miles) from Saturn.
Scale in the original image was roughly 1 Km (about 0,6 mile) per pixel".
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