The shadow of Mimas falls across the Cassini Division in this beautiful natural color, wide-angle view from Cassini’s camera. Views like these are possible only once every 15 years, as Saturn’s spring and autumn equinoxes bring its rings and moons into horizontal alignment with the equitorial plane of the solar system and the light of…
Month: June 2009
A River Runs Through It
…or has very recently, geologically speaking. But that river would be of liquid methane, not water. And it would be hundreds of degrees below zero. And it would be on Saturn’s moon Titan. This topographic radar image, taken by Cassini during a flyby of the moon on May 21, pierced the dense clouds of Titan…
Up, Up, and Away!
I don’t know what else to say except that this is pretty much the freakin’ coolest thing I’ve seen in a while. And you know that Lights in the Dark specializes in pretty freakin’ cool things. 😉 At 5:32 PM EST on Thursday, June 18, the Atlas V rocket carrying the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter…
The Prodigal Sunspot
Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research have released this stunning image, a high-resolution computer model of a sunspot, created over a period of several weeks by a supercomputer performing at a rate of 76 trillion calculations per second. This is, to date, the most…
Dark Shadows
A sliver of a shadow, thousands of miles long, slices into the twilight side of Saturn’s rings and drifts off the edge of the A ring in this 8-frame animation. (Click the image to play.) As well as the motion of the moon shadow, thicker sections of the F ring can be seen moving along…
Poll Position
Because I’m all about my readers, I’d like to know what you’d like to see here on Lights in the Dark! I try to find the most recent and visually interesting images from the various robotic missions around our solar system to post every day, but if there’s nothing new or particularly interesting to look…
Hail, Calypso
A lesser-known moon, Calypso orbits Saturn in the same path as Tethys and another miniature moon called Telesto. Known as the “Tethys Trojans”, these two oblong-shaped moons were discovered in 1980 by Earth-based telescopes and eventually photographed by Cassini. The moniker “trojan” in astronomy is reserved for satellites that orbit a planet in the same…
Devils’ Causeways
Like a child’s random scribblings, the tracks of countless dust devils trace dark swirls across the surface of Mars in a region called Russell Crater. Dust devils – caused by surface air heated during the day rising upwards in spinning columns – are extremely common on Mars and pick up the thin Martian sand easily,…
Meet the Clumps
87,000 miles from the cloudtops of Saturn’s equator writhes the hazy cords of the F ring, a braided belt of icy dust that shifts and twists around and over itself. Clumps of material gather together and separate, and make the thin ring vary in thickness anywhere from under 20 miles to over 300 miles wide….
When the Wind Blows
This 20-frame animation shows dust-laden winds blowing across the Martian plains near Spirit’s current position…which is the same position she’s been in for several weeks since becoming mired in the soft sand on the western edge of “Home Plate”. Regardless of her predicament, Spirit’s energy levels are in good supply due to these same winds…
Pandorama
This animation, made up of 7 raw image frames taken by Cassini’s wide-angle camera, shows Saturn’s ring system ponderously rotating, the reflected light off the gas giant illuminating the dark material of the Cassini Division. In the lower right the moon Pandora orbits outside the twisted cords of the F ring. The planet itself is…
Will Worlds Collide?
According to a June 10 article in New Scientist, studies on the variable nature of planetary orbits have shown some valid possibilities of collisions in the future. (The very distant future, luckily for us.) Due to the nature of Jupiter’s massive gravitational pull on the inner planets, especially Mercury, their orbits are susceptible to incredible…
Lights in the Dark 