At the beginning of September the world was treated to a fantastic view of the night side of Pluto, captured by the New Horizons spacecraft as it departed the distant icy world on July 14, 2015. Backlit by the sun, Pluto’s surprisingly complex atmospheric haze created a ghostly glow above its crescent-lit limb while frozen mountains cast…
Author: Jason Major
Jason is a Rhode Island-based graphic designer, photographer, nature lover, and space exploration fanatic.
Pics Are In from Cassini’s Flyby Through Enceladus’ Plumes!
On Wed. Oct. 28 Cassini performed its lowest-altitude dive yet through the icy plumes of Enceladus, coming just 30 miles from the moon’s surface — that’s only about 6 times higher than a commercial airliner at cruising altitude. But, traveling over 19,000 mph relative to Enceladus (which is 38 times faster than a jet plane!) the pass was…
Pluto’s Moon Kerberos Gets Into the Picture
For decades, far-off Pluto and its moons were just a collection of bright spots in even our most powerful telescopes. Now the dwarf planet and its family of five moons has been revealed in intimate detail with the long-awaited flyby of the New Horizons spacecraft. Last week the “family portrait” of the Pluto system was made…
This Four-Minute Trailer Supercut is a Star Wars Tsunami
If you’re as excited about Star Wars: The Force Awakens as I am (and apparently plenty of others — tickets for the film have already sold out two months before it opens) then you’ll love this: a nearly four-minute “supercut” of all of the trailers and teasers that have thus far been released. Assembled by James…
This Asteroid Will Come Eerily Close to Earth on Halloween
Yes, it’s true: a rather not-so-tiny near-Earth asteroid SKULL-SHAPED ZOMBIE COMET (see below) 2015 TB145 will make a relatively close pass by our dear planet Earth on October 31, aka Halloween — the day when certain beliefs profess that the veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead is at its thinnest, allowing spiritual and even physical interaction to occur…
Icy Enceladus Shines in the Latest Images from Cassini
On Wednesday, Oct. 14 2015, Cassini performed its scheduled “E-20” close pass of Enceladus, a 320-mile-wide moon of Saturn that is now famous for the organics-laden ice geysers that fire from cracks in its southern crust. E-20 is the first of a series of three flybys to be performed before the end of 2015, specifically timed to…
Rhea Eclipses Dione While Cassini Watches
It’s been a while since I last made one of these: it’s an animation comprising 27 images acquired by Cassini in various color channels on October 11, 2015. It shows Saturn’s second-largest moon Rhea passing in front of the smaller and more distant* Dione, both partially illuminated by sunlight. I cleaned up some image artifacts…
Tons of Unprocessed Apollo Mission Photos Are Now Just a Click Away
This has made quite a splash across the internet over the past several weeks, and for good reason: the Project Apollo Archive is now on Flickr, giving anyone and everyone point-and-click access to some of the best scans of original Apollo mission photographs that have been made to date. Really, this is something you can get…
A New Look at Pluto: Hey There Mister Blue, We’re So Pleased to Be With You…
Not unlike what’s found here on Earth, the faraway dwarf planet* Pluto has a sky tinted blue with scattered sunlight, as seen in the latest image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft!
Deleted Scene From The Martian Shows Even MOAR SCIENCE!!1!
Have you gone to see The Martian yet? (And if you haven’t, my review of it may help speed you on your way.) Did you love it? Just kidding — of course you did. But did you read the book first? If you did, you may have noticed that a lot of Mark Watney’s hands-on…
Surprise: Ceres’ Bright Spots are Probably Salt
So now that NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been in orbit around Ceres for seven months, has the nature of its strange bright spots finally been determined? Are they brilliantly reflective deposits of water ice, as many initially suspected? Or just some curiously-bright rock faces? (Or the metallic remains of an ancient alien space base, like more…
One Space Blogger’s Review of The Martian
If you’re a space fan and you’ve decided to hold off seeing The Martian on opening weekend until you know what to expect, I totally understand — I very rarely see films on opening weekends myself (I have a thing about overcrowded theaters, but that’s another story.) And I also hate to be sorely disappointed…
Lights in the Dark 