As a special treat for today, I’ve assembled a montage of amazing video footage from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera and put it to music by the talented Nicholas Gunn (a fitting track from his Grand Canyon album.) These videos were CG constructed using stereo image data and topographical mapping information from the MRO, recreating…
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Total Eclipse of the Earth
Japan’s KAGUYA satellite took this photo of Earth from its orbit around the Moon during a penumbral eclipse – the positioning of the Earth between the Sun and Moon – on February 10, 2009 with its high-definition camera. This is the first time such an event has been photographed from the Moon. During a penumbral…
At Cliff’s Edge
Martian ground slips away into Ganges Chasm, one of many deep troughs that make up the vast Valles Marineris. Valles Marineris (Mariner Valley) is the largest known canyon in the solar system, 7 times deeper than the Grand Canyon and as long as the distance from New York to Los Angeles. It slices across…
Swinging By
Today, the spacecraft Dawn will get a little help from Mars by using its gravity to alter its course to visit Vesta and Ceres, two of the largest asteroids in the solar system. Dawn, a 2,500-pound satellite launched in September ’07, will come within 341 miles of Mars today at 4:28 PST (7:28 EST) as…
News Post: Fire in the Sky
Video of a fiery chunk of material falling to Earth was captured Sunday, February 15th in Austin, TX during local Channel 8 news coverage of the Austin Marathon. While some initially thought it may be debris from the recent collision of a U.S. and Russian satellite, the FAA is saying it was in fact a…
Distant Hills
Spirit sent us this image today from its position inside Gusev Crater on Mars, its cameras looking out over a rocky expanse called “Home Plate”. The original image was greyscale…I colored it in an attempt to approximate true color based on other true-color photos. It’s a little off but it’s pretty close to actual…
Enigmatic Enceladus
The tortured terrain of Enceladus (en-SELL-a-dus) comes into light in this image taken by Cassini last October. This is actually a false-color mosaic of 28 images, assembled by the imaging operations center in Boulder, CO. The bluish tints are used to highlight features on the moon’s surface and show different densities of surface material. I rotated…
Eye of the Storm
The swirling storms of Jupiter writhe and churn while little Europa sails by in this dramatic photo from Cassini, taken on January 2, 2001 and retouched and edited to show natural colors by the talented Gordan Ugarkovic. Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot is featured prominently here. It is an enormous hurricane that has been…
Above the Rings
One of many moons, little Mimas seems to hover above the vast sweeping rings of Saturn in this Cassini image. (It actually lies in the same plane as the rings.) The orbiter was nearly 2 million miles away from Mimas when this photo was taken last September. Saturn has 52 officially named moons. Mimas is…
A Distant Horizon
Still one of the most compelling images taken by the Spirit exploration rover, this photo of the Sun setting behind distant mountains was taken on May 19, 2005. (In reality the “mountains” are actually the rim of a large crater.) The color here is pretty close to what a person would see were they…
Eddies and Whirls
Storms of varying sizes churn in Saturn’s northern hemisphere in this true-color image taken by the Cassini orbiter on November 29, 2008. The reason for the blue color is still not known, but it seems to fade with the winter season coming to an end. This photo was taken from a distance of 683,000 miles…
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