Dione, From Afar

As the year winds down, can we take a moment to remember how beautiful our Universe can be? Especially our little local piece of it. That image above was taken by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since--and I still have a hard time believing this--2004. In more than a decade it has taken countless observations of Saturn, its atmosphere, the rings, and its ridiculously photogenic moons. The photo shows Dione, a mostly-ice-but-with-some-rock moon, some 1,120 kilometers across...