The recently-named Picasso crater on Mercury, shown in the center of this image, is 83 miles wide and features an interestingly-shaped depression in its center that’s thought to have been caused by the collapse of a magma chamber beneath the surface. Features like this are important to planetary scientists because they indicate the existence of…
Month: May 2010
Titanesque
Here’s an image of Titan as seen by Cassini on May 23, 2010. I combined data from the red, green and blue color filters as well as overlaying some surface detail of the moon’s dark dune fields captured with the spacecraft’s cloud-piercing near-infrared camera. Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute/J. Major
Journey Into The Sun
Here’s a very informative segment about the Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft (now offering continuously updating views of the Sun!) from KQED, the Northern California Public Broadcasting channel. Enjoy!
Sinking the Shot
Alan Shepard may have played some moon golf during his visit in 1971 but even he wouldn’t have been up to par with this course. 😉 This photo shows the trail of a house-sized (33-foot-wide) lunar boulder that has rolled downhill and come to rest inside the rim of a crater. The image was taken…
A Clouded Giant
Image data are now coming in from today’s flyby of Titan, the image above is a rotated color-composite made from three raw images taken with Cassini’s red, green and blue visible light color filters. (I think I got the north-south alignment right…) Titan’s high-level hydrocarbon haze is visible, a pale blue and violet band encircling…
Solar Crossing
Another shining example of perfect timing and photographic expertise by Thierry Legault, this image shows the shuttle Atlantis as it somersaults in front of the International Space Station in order to have its underbelly checked out on May 16. Over 200 miles above the Earth, the ISS and Atlantis passed briefly in front of the…
Through the Plumes
Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society calls this “the most amazing image of Enceladus Cassini has captured yet.” While I like some of the images from November’s flyby a bit more, this is still very, very cool! It is a combination of two images (processed by unmannedspaceflight.com member Astro0) taken during the same flyby event,…
Peekaboo Moon
Here’s another color composite from Cassini, showing Rhea on the far side of the rings, its northern tip peeking through the Cassini Division. (I’m not 100% sure what smaller moon that is on the left, but my guess is either Janus or Epimetheus.) What I find interesting in this image is the bright streak within…
Skimming the Rings
Saturn’s second-largest moon Rhea passes across the face of the ringed planet in this image, color-combined from three raw images taken by Cassini on May 8, 2010. The rings are seen on edge here, a dark horizontal stripe running underneath the cratered 950-mile-wide moon, their wide shadows cast onto Saturn’s atmosphere below. I really love…
The Light of a Distant Sun
Since I haven’t posted in a while, I thought I’d put up this image I was playing with last week…it’s a raw image of Saturn’s moon Iapetus combined with a bit of a “glow” from an off-frame Sun and a few stars thrown into the background. Just for curiosity’s sake. 🙂 914-mile-wide Iapetus was discovered…
May the 4th be with you…
Happy Star Wars Day! Now there’s a holiday I can really get into. 🙂 To celebrate, I felt that it would be appropriate to post about the most Star-Warsy object in our solar system: Saturn’s moon Mimas! Below is a repost from March 29, Now That’s a Moon! Here we go again… This portrait of…
This Week in Space
With Miles O’Brien on vacation, David Waters hosts this episode of This Week in Space highlighting rocket plane racing, the upcoming private-sector SpaceX rocket launch, the Atlantis and Discovery shuttle missions with new antimatter telescope components to be installed aboard the ISS, NASA uses weather satellites to keep an eye on BP’s oily mess in…
Lights in the Dark 