The largest of Jupiter’s 63 known moons and the largest moon in our solar system, Ganymede has twice the mass of our own moon and is even larger than the planet Mercury. Its surface is marked by dark regions which are full of craters and lighter areas lined with ridges. This image was taken by…
Month: July 2009
Pluto Reinstated?
Will Pluto be reissued its former status as a full-fledged planet? While it won’t necessarily be a topic of debate at next week’s meeting of the International Astronomical Union – the group in charge of, amongst other things, the official naming of all things extraterrestrial and thus the group responsible for voting Pluto off the…
Blast Zone
The Hubble Space Telescope trained its newly-installed Wide Field Camera 3 on Jupiter, capturing a photo of the recent impact scar made on July 19. This image is the first taken by the new camera installed in May, and while it’s still uncalibrated, details can be seen of the dark debris plume that has spread…
The Ring
No, it’s not the final frame of a haunted videotape…it’s a backlit Titan, silhouetted against the sun, photographed by Cassini from over 850,000 miles away. Titan’s upper-level atmospheric haze is illuminated in this image, surrounding the moon high above the cloudtops. The haze is a mixture of complex hydrocarbons created by the breakdown of methane…
It’s a Small World
Another wonderful image from the Apollo Image Gallery, this scanned film image shows the ascent stage of the Eagle lander as photographed by Neil Armstrong, with the partially-lit Earth floating in the black lunar sky above. This is how our world looks from 239,000 miles away. Basically it would look 4 times larger than the…
Taking a Hit
Between the hours of 6am and noon EDT on Monday, July 20, something smashed into Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. And here’s the scar to prove it. First noticed as a dark blotch by amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley, monitoring the giant planet via telescope from Australia, the impact was soon confirmed via…
A Leap for Mankind
“That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” After speaking these historic words at 10:56 EDT on July 20, 1969, marking the moment that humanity first placed a foot on a world other than its own, Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong began his work documenting the lunar surface before him. The…
Thin Grey Line
Saturn’s expansive rings cast but a thin line of a shadow across its equator in this beautiful high-angle view taken by Cassini on July 18, 2009. The rings, normally overexposed in images to make them more visible, are instead underexposed here so some of the details of Saturn’s atmosphere can be seen. Intricate banding of…
Eagle’s Eye View
In the center of this image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, there’s a small object casting a shadow toward the right. That object is the remaining section of the Apollo 11 lunar module, Eagle, from which astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin made history as the first humans to step foot on the moon…
Shifting Sands
Serpentine dunes etch the polar sands of Mars in this image from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. See the original release here. The MRO was 194 miles above the surface when it took this photo. Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
The Oceans of Venus?
It’s hard to imagine, with its pressure-cooked 800º baked-rock surface, but Venus may have once had oceans, suggests data from the European Space Agency’s Venus Express orbiter. Extensive infrared mapping of Venus’ southern hemisphere shows large areas of rock that appears to be granite. Granite, as we know it on Earth, is formed when basalt…
Three Little Moons
A little family portrait from the house of Saturn. Enceladus, Tethys and Dione. Okay, they weren’t really all lined up like that….I combined three raw shots from Cassini, taken over the weekend, and lined them up nicely. Approximate sizes in relation to each other. Just for fun. Great images though! Tethys’ huge 250-mile-wide Odysseus crater…
Lights in the Dark 