Mike: Enceladus enjoys an orbit near the other easily visable satellites, While Iapteus is out much farther. I remember these moons by METDRT and I've seen all but Mimas in my telescope because it tends to get lost in the bright rings. Iaeptus isn't on the monthly wiggle diagram because of it's larger orbit and Alan MacRoberts has described finding it by turning off your clock drive and waiting for it to drift into the field of view. Also the variable albedo can make it's brightness variable. Enceladus has an albedo of 1.0 which is about as good as it gets. DT --- On Fri, 6/20/08, Wilson Family <astro_outwest@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Wilson Family <astro_outwest@yahoo.com> Subject: [Utah-astronomy] Sky & Telescope's Saturn Moons application To: "Utah astronomy blog" <utah-astronomy@mailman.xmission.com> Date: Friday, June 20, 2008, 12:18 PM Hey guys, I've been looking at the Java Script application that Sky & Telescope has concerning the positions of Saturn's moons. I note that it lists Enceladus as one of the visible moons while omitting Iapetus. The problem is, Iapetus was discovered more than 100 years before Enceladus (Cassini in 1671 vs. Herschel in 1789) because it's 2.8 times larger. Did Sky & Telescope make a boo-boo or is Enceladus's ice coating making it so much brighter than Iapetus that it's more easily discernable? I'm doing a PowerPoint presentation on Saturn at SPOC tomorrow evening that has a slide showing the relative positions of the Saturnian moons and I'd like to have it labeled correctly. Your expert help would be appreciated. Mike Wilson
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