A serpentine shape twists across the floor and walls of a canyon on Mars, suggesting the form of a dragon snaking across a clouded sky. This image from the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows light-colored material deposited onto the darker-toned surface, possibly through a flow of some sort, in a corner…
Month: November 2010
Sweet Sixteen: Jupiter in Motion
This video, made up of 16 images assembled from Voyager 1 data by astro-artist Björn Jónsson and animated by Ian Regan, shows a time period spanning 16 Jupiter days (about 7 days Earth-time) wherein we can briefly observe the dynamics of the different cloud belts and spinning storms in the gas giant’s swirling atmosphere. Especially prominent is the…
Mercury’s Ancient Scar
One of the largest craters discovered in our solar system, Mercury’s Caloris basin measures in at over 963 miles (1550 km) wide…easily big enough to contain the state of Texas or all of the Great Lakes! This mosaic image shows the huge crater in its entirety – it’s the light-toned region that dominates the central part…
From the LITD Archives: Wave Forms
(Originally posted on June 27, 2009) Cast shadows reveal some interesting structure in the waves sent up by little Daphnis in this image, taken by the Cassini spacecraft on June 26, 2009. Daphnis orbits Saturn within the 26-mile-wide Keeler gap in the A ring. Its gravity disrupts the edges of the gap, carving scalloped edges in…
Just Passing By
Holy lunar photobomb, Batman! In another brief occultation event the Moon snuck in front of SDO’s cameras on Saturday, November 6, this time passing across the orbiting observatory’s view of the Sun’s southern pole and southeastern limb in a diagonal motion. This happened previously on October 7… seems like the Moon doesn’t much like being…
Starlights in the Dark
Save the starlight! 🙂 Another great installment of the too-smart-for-everyone’s-own-good webcomic xkcd.
A Smooth Approach to Hartley 2
The video above was created by Daniel Macháček (of UnmannedSpaceflight.com fame) and shows a smoothed-out version of Deep Impact’s (d.b.a. EPOXI) now-world-famous pass of Comet 103P/Hartley 2 on November 4, 2010. Using Squirlz Morph freeware he was able to use five close-up images from the spacecraft and turn them into an animation that portrays a very…
Visiting a Comet
They’re calling it a “peanut with jets”…Comet Hartley 2, discovered 26 years ago by astronomer Malcolm Hartley, received a brief but fascinating visit today by NASA’s EPOXI spacecraft at 10:01 am EDT. Images were received on Earth half an hour later, and I assembled these initial 5 close-ups into the rough animation above. (Click to…
It’s All Downhill
This image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a close-up of an 80-foot-wide boulder on the central peak of Gassendi Crater, a trail left behind it in the dark lunar soil. There’s even a bit of a pile-up of soil in front of it where it came to rest! Several smaller boulders on either side…
Good Vibrations
Dynamic spike-like structures along the edges of Saturn’s rings are caused by oscillations of material that mimics the behavior of our entire galaxy…in other words, Saturn’s rings are a miniature version of the Milky Way! Along the outer edge of the dense B ring Cassini mission scientists have observed ring particles rising above the ringplane…
Lights in the Dark 