It’s not the famous “pale blue dot” image, but it sure is close: on August 26 the Juno spacecraft turned its JunoCam to take this image of the Earth and the Moon from a distance of about 6 million miles. From that distance, our world is effectively reduced to a bright fuzzy dot, with a smaller,…
Month: August 2011
High Over Hyperion
The Cassini spacecraft passed by Saturn’s spongy-looking moon Hyperion yesterday, August 25, and returned some very dramatic images like the one seen here – fascinating! At 15,000 miles this was Cassini’s second-closest approach to Hyperion. It will pass by again on September 16 at just over twice that distance. The closest it has come to Hyperion…
Granular Flows in a Copernican Crater
Sometimes flows of material on the Moon are made of light-colored material, sometimes they’re made of dark-colored material. This is definitely an example of the latter! This is a small portion of a Narrow-Angle Camera image taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, showing detail of “low-reflectance” granular material sliding down the wall of a crater…
Daphnis in Full Color
If you’ve been following along with Lights in the Dark since the beginning, you may know that this is one of my favorite subjects of space imagery: the shepherd moon Daphnis, traveling in its orbit around Saturn within the 26-mile-wide Keeler Gap. Recently color-calibrated by Gordan Ugarvovic, this is a true-color version of an image…
Martian Motion
Can’t see the video below? Watch on YouTube here. The Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla got a chance to hone her animation skills further with this cool sequence showing clouds drifting over the surface of Mars, made from images taken by the Mars Express orbiter back in October 2010. Awesome! The region shown here is known…
A Look Inside Mars
This new HiRISE image gives us a deeper look into Mars… literally! Earlier this year a crater was spotted on Mars with a dark spot at its center. When the HiRISE team at the University of Arizona took a closer look with the MRO’s high-resolution camera they saw that the spot is actually a 115-foot-wide…
STS-135: A Final Tribute
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Kennedy Space Center recently released this wonderful video, an emotional farewell to the space shuttle program with a recap of the launch and landing of the STS-135 Atlantis mission. From the preparation of the four-person crew to the systems go for launch, the hundreds of thousands who gathered…
Got Questions About Comet Elenin?
NASA’s got answers. For some reason, ever since it was first discovered last December, Comet Elenin has been surrounded by a lot of misinformation regarding the danger it poses to Earth. True, it will be swinging around the Sun in a path that takes it “relatively” close to Earth and the other inner planets in…
A Snowman on Vesta
Aptly nicknamed the “Snowman”, these three craters were imaged on August 6, 2011 by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft in orbit around the protoplanet Vesta. Located on Vesta’s northern hemisphere, the craters were first visible to researchers on July 23. Dawn has been in orbit around Vesta for one month now and has already returned many amazingly detailed…
Where The Craters Have No Name
The latest in a series of new images coming in almost daily from the MESSENGER spacecraft currently in orbit around Mercury, this is a look at an unnamed crater on Mercury’s southern hemisphere. The smooth crater floor is likely due to impact melt that formed during the collision that produced the crater. Also visible are…
On The Rim Of Endeavour!
After almost three years of travel across the cold, rusty plains of Mars the last remaining functioning rover on Mars has finally reached her goal: the rim of the giant Endeavour Crater! Congratulations Opportunity and the MER team! “Our arrival at this destination is a reminder that these rovers have continued far beyond the original…
An X-rated Flare
At 8:11 a.m. UT (3:11 am EDT) this morning the Sun unleashed a huge solar flare. Rated an X6.9, it was the most powerful flare of the current solar cycle… so strong, in fact, that some high-frequency radio blackouts were experienced here on Earth shortly after. It was three times stronger than the X2.2 February…
Lights in the Dark 