The setting sun lights up the the neon blue line of Earth’s atmosphere in this photo taken by the crew of the International Space Station during the STS-129 shuttle mission. Click for the full-size view. The darkness of space above and a dark night on Earth below, this “thin blue line” is all that exists…
Northern Exposure
This video shows the movement of energetic aurora over Saturn’s northern hemisphere, taken by the Cassini spacecraft over the course of four days. Saturn’s aurora is caused by the same process as found on Earth but the results are much, much larger…some of the lights seen here stretch nearly 750 miles above the edge of…
Mountains of the Moon
Taken by the LROC camera on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, this image shows a detailed look at the mountains within Cabeus Crater – the region where the LCROSS’ Centaur stage rocket impacted to send up a plume of water-rich lunar soil. Many of the shadows seen here are permanent fixtures. The Moon’s orbit…
Ennie and the Jets
Another great image from the latest flyby of Enceladus by the Cassini spacecraft, this one shows three frigid plumes firing off into space from the moon’s south pole. More images from the flyby can be seen on my previous posts, or by going to the CICLOPS site listed in the sidebar. This last flyby…
Cold and Bright
After making its flyby early Saturday morning the Cassini spacecraft captured this full-sized view of Enceladus from a distance of about 83,000 miles. (Image has been level-adjusted to bring out surface details. Original raw image can be seen here.) 318 miles across at its widest point, Enceladus’ wrinkled surface is composed of water ice that…
Images from Enceladus!
The raw images from Cassini’s eighth flyby of Enceladus are in! And they don’t disappoint…the highlight of the set so far, in my opinion, is the image above showing the moon’s signature ice geysers erupting from fracture lines called “tiger stripes” surrounding the south pole. Highlighted by sunlight, the plumes follow the lines of the…
Big Sisters
Rhea and Titan, Saturn’s two largest moons, align in Cassini’s lens in this image taken on November 19, 2009. I level-adjusted and rotated the original raw image file…”north” would be to the right in this view. Rhea is 949 miles wide, cold, icy and airless. Titan, 3,200 miles wide, is also frigidly cold but is…
Solar Power
This video taken by the SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) spacecraft, a joint project by NASA and the European Space Agency, shows a large bright active region on the Sun rotating into view on November 13. These areas, many times larger than Earth, expel large amounts of solar material and energy in the form of…
Written in Stone
This image from the HiRISE high-resolution camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) shows multiple layers of exposed sedimentary rock on Mars in a region known as Arabia Terra. Referred to as “cyclic bedding” by geologists, this pattern of layering is caused by repeated fluctuations in the amount of sediment available to create new rock…
Enceladus and Rhea
In another stately pas de deux as seen from the point of view of the Cassini spacecraft, moons Rhea and Enceladus slip past each other in their eternal travels around Saturn. This animation is made up of 20 raw images from Cassini, taken on November 15, level-adjusted and rotated 90º clockwise. Enceladus is about to…
South Pacific
Another beautiful image of Earth from the Rosetta spacecraft’s OSIRIS imaging system, showing swirling clouds in an anticyclone over the South Pacific. The false-color composite is a portion of a larger view of the planet, taken as Rosetta flew by Earth on November 13. It is a combination of image data taken through the orange,…
An Example of Extremes
Giant, haze-covered Titan sits in front of craggy, potato-shaped Hyperion in this image from Cassini, taken on November 13. These two vastly different moons occupy neighboring orbits and thus affect each other’s travels around Saturn…although Titan obviously takes the lead in this dance. 168-mile-wide Hyperion is forced to speed up and slow down as it…
Lights in the Dark 