Telescope twin powers: ACTIVATE! Form of… an asteroid? Okay, so the telescopes involved aren’t twins — one is a giant 70-meter dish in California’s Mojave Desert and the other is a 305-meter behemoth high in the Puerto Rican rain forest — they did combine their powers to image the passing asteroid 2014 HQ124 on June 8…
Author: Jason Major
Jason is a Rhode Island-based graphic designer, photographer, nature lover, and space exploration fanatic.
What Made This Curious Cross Pattern on the Moon?
It’s not a trick of the light or camera sensor artifacts, there are actually geometric lines etched into the lunar surface in the image above, captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. But these aren’t the work of ancient aliens (or Richard Hoagland’s favorite Photoshop filters) — they’re tracks left by the Soviet rover Lunokhod 2 during its…
What’s Ahead for Cassini?
If you’ve been a faithful reader of Lights in the Dark over the past five years you know that I just love Cassini (and you probably do too!) In orbit around Saturn since 2004, Cassini has taken us on an intimate tour of the Saturnian system for a decade now, revealing the incredible beauty of the…
Oxygen Isotopes Support Our Moon’s Violent Origin
While it may not be a true “smoking gun” (there have been four and a half billion years of cooling off, after all!) scientists in Germany have found further support for the currently accepted scenario of the origin of our Moon, based on chemical analysis of rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts. (And yes, we really went to…
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Isn’t So Great Anymore
It used to be said with confidence by even grade-school kids that the largest storm in the Solar System was Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, which has been churning for at least 350 years and could fit three Earths across it. And while it’s true that the GRS is a truly enormous hurricane by Earthly standards, these…
No, The Moon Landings Weren’t Faked.
Yes, we really landed 12 men on the Moon from 1969-1972. Get over it.
Hubble Spots Saturn’s Northern Lights
Earth isn’t the only planet with auroras — any world with a magnetic field and an atmosphere can get a light show around its poles when its star’s wind is blowing hard enough!* The image above shows Saturn’s northern lights, as seen in ultraviolet light by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys in…
MESSENGER Gets Up Close and Personal With Mercury
Mercury’s ready for its close-up, Mr. MESSENGER! At an incredible 5 meters per pixel, the image above is one of the highest-resolution images of Mercury’s surface ever captured. It was acquired on March 15 with the MESSENGER spacecraft’s MDIS (Mercury Dual Imaging System) instrument and shows an 8.3-km (5.2-mile) -wide section of the planet’s north polar region, speckled…
Now You Can Watch Beautiful Live Video of Earth From Space
This is something really special, and everyone should know about it, and so I’m doing my part and sharing it here but please feel free to pass it along yourself as well. We now have publicly-accessible, high-definition video of our planet coming in live from the Space Station, thanks to the High Definition Earth Viewing…
Book Review: “Earthrise” by Apollo 14 Astronaut Ed Mitchell
To date only 12 humans have ever set foot on the surface of the Moon. Ed Mitchell is one of them… and this is the story of how he got there and what it was like when he did. (Now that’s a claim not many authors can make!) Earthrise: My Adventures as an Apollo 14 Astronaut…
This is How Saturn’s Rings Would Look to a Butterfly
You don’t typically see Saturn’s rings looking like this, but then you can’t see in ultraviolet like Cassini (or many insects) can! The image above was acquired by the UVIS (UltraViolet Imaging Spectrograph) instrument aboard the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft on June 30, 2004, just as it was entering orbit around Saturn. The area shown here is…
Curiosity Smiles For The Camera In Her Newest Selfie
What were you doing on Sunday night? Whatever it was (and by the way I do hope it was watching Cosmos) about the same time, 59.5 million miles away, NASA’s Curiosity rover was taking her picture on Mars inside Gale Crater! Here’s Curiosity’s latest “selfie,” a mosaic I assembled from about a dozen images acquired…
Lights in the Dark 