Covered with deep, punched-in craters, Saturn’s 168-mile- (270-km-) wide moon Hyperion resembles a sea sponge more than it does a moon. But a moon it is…in fact, Hyperion is the largest irregularly-shaped moon in the solar system. This image, one of the first sent back from Cassini since awakening from its three-week-long “safe mode” following…
Month: November 2010
Fear a-Flying
Part of a bulk data release from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter (available at ftp://psa.esac.esa.int/pub/mirror/MARS-EXPRESS/HRSC, posted on unmannedspaceflight.com by user peter59) this wonderful image shows Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons, in orbit against the backdrop of the planet’s limb. The dark, irregularly-shaped moon is shown in amazing clarity, giving a very nice…
From the LITD Archives: Sheer Elegance
Originally posted on March 13, 2009, here’s a quick reprint in honor of Cassini’s return to business! Viewed from the unlit side, the delicate transparency of Saturn’s innermost “C” Ring becomes apparent in this photo. Saturn’s upper atmospheric haze can be seen through the dark material of the rings. This photo shows a natural color view. Image…
Haunting Beauty
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Congrats to Tor Even Mathisen for making the Astronomy Picture of the Day today with his beautiful time-lapse video of the aurora borealis illuminating the night sky over Tromsø, Norway! I first came across this video last week on Bad Astronomy, it’s a hauntingly beautiful presentation of the…
Window on the World
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to look out of the windows of the space station orbiting Earth at an altitude of 220 miles, watch this video! (Give it a few seconds to start up.) Expedition 25 flight engineer Scott Kelly gives us a tour of the station’s cupola, offering astronauts a…
Where the Sun Don’t Shine
There are places surprisingly close by that are the coldest known spots in the entire solar system: on our Moon’s south pole lie deep craters that never receive direct sunlight, in fact have never seen the Sun, and within these craters lie pockets of ice that contain the same frozen material they’ve had since forming…
A Sinuous Strand
Featured on the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s Pick of the Week, this image from the observatory’s AIA 304 camera shows a gigantic filament snaking around the Sun’s southern hemisphere, hundreds of thousands of miles of magnetically-contained plasma made visible in extreme ultraviolet light. Filaments are bands of relatively cooler, denser solar material caught up in magnetic…
Waiting for Cassini
Color portrait of Saturn from Cassini It’s no secret to anyone who’s been following my posts these last couple of years…images from the Cassini mission are my personal favorites and make up more than half of all my posts. So you can imagine my dismay when Cassini went into a “safe” mode over the past…
Earthshine
It may look like a science fiction film but it’s very much science reality: a view from the window of the International Space Station, taken on November 7 by astronaut Doug Wheelock, shows external structures lit by a cool blue light reflected off our planet – “Earthshine” – while the bright crescent of dawn blooms…
Spaceballs!
Holy interplanetary snowstorm! This image, a focused (“deconvolved”) view of comet Hartley 2 which was approached by NASA’s EPOXI spacecraft on November 4, shows a swarm of specks surrounding an ice-spraying, boulder-crusted nucleus. Those specks aren’t stars, they’re golfball- to basketball-sized balls of loosely-packed ice particles… a.k.a snowballs! And comet Hartley-2 is literally surrounded by them…
Lovely Leonids
It was cloudy in my neck of the woods last night so I missed any Leonids I would have seen (not to mention the ever-present bubble of light that surrounds my city), but it was nice and clear where my friend Li Kim lives and she was enthusiastic enough to get out and capture some…
Saturn’s “Storm Alley”
Dark swirling vortices march along Saturn’s “storm alley” in this section of an image taken by Cassini on May 19, 2008. (It was recently uploaded as a featured image on JPL’s Flickr page.) Storms on Saturn are huge and powerful, with winds blowing many hundreds of miles per hour and often featuring lightning ten thousand…
Lights in the Dark 