What you are seeing here is the shadow of the ring on Saturn itself.

That planet is called Saturn.

Saturn is a planet.

But it visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Many moons orbit around Saturn.

Most of the beautiful pictures we've taken of Saturn, in fact, show Saturn in accompaniment with some of its moons. Here's Saturn with Dione, and then, here's Saturn showing the rings edge on, showing you just how vertically thin they are, with the moon Enceladus.

Planet Saturn. Yes, that's good.

Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco shows images from the Cassini voyage to Saturn, focusing on its largest moon, Titan, and on frozen Enceladus, which seems to shoot jets of ice.

Saturn is the second largest planet in the Solar System.

Carolyn Porco Could a Saturn moon harbor life?

Now, the Saturn system is a rich planetary system.

Now, two of the 47 moons that Saturn has are standouts.

Sega Saturn emulator

Saturn is accompanied by a very large and diverse collection of moons.

This was a project to build a 4,000 ton nuclear bomb propelled spaceship and go to Saturn and Jupiter.

It looks like Saturn because, of course, it is.

There stand some interesting places a little further out the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

The Sun is behind Saturn, so we see what we call forward scattering, so it highlights all the rings. And I'm going to zoom.

So this is a Yellowstone, you know, of Saturn.

And those are Titan and Enceladus. Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and, until Cassini had arrived there, was the largest single expanse of unexplored terrain that we had remaining in our solar system.

If you go to the safari parks on Saturn or Jupiter, you will be disappointed.

There s my very own Saturn V.

So, let me show you a little bit on what that Saturnian system looks like.

First, I'm going to fly you over the rings.

This is actually taken from the satellite that we have in orbit around Saturn, the Cassini.

This artist's impression turned into reality when a parachute landed on Titan, Saturn's giant moon.

Carolyn Porco flies us to Saturn

And so it turns out that methane is to Titan what water is to the Earth.

Try to imagine what the surface of Titan might look like.

It is a total eclipse of the Sun, seen from the other side of Saturn.

It was a picture of Earth captured in that frame of Saturn.

That is, almost everybody sees the planet Saturn.

The temperature at the surface is some 350 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

Two years ago here at TED I reported that we had discovered at Saturn, with the Cassini Spacecraft, an anomalously warm and geologically active region at the southern tip of the small Saturnine moon Enceladus, seen here.

So that's why you have these gaps, is because a small satellite, you know, is being formed in that location.

And just to kind of put us in perspective, this is a picture of Saturn taken with a spacecraft from behind Saturn, looking towards the Sun.

It is seen from, in this case, from outside the orbit of Saturn.

As I said, it has a thick, extensive atmosphere.

But as if that weren't brilliant enough, we can spot, in this beautiful image, sight of our own planet, cradled in the arms of Saturn's rings.

Here we see a 10,000 ton ship will deliver 1,300 tons to Saturn and back essentially a five year trip.

But we couldn't make sense of our images, until, six months after we got into orbit, an event occurred that many have regarded as the highlight of Cassini's investigation of Titan.

And that could be translated into mey meen, which is the old Dravidian name for the planet Saturn.

And you see the amount of detail that is in those rings, which are the particles.

It was so mystifying we couldn't make out what we were seeing on Titan.

We have maps of Venus, but not of the western territorial trust.