A very cool animation sequence by Gordan U., showing 21 sequences of the Jupiter system. Big Daddy Jove, clouds a-churnin’, all the kids running around. Nice work Gordan! Animation: Gordan Ugarkovic. Used with permission.
Chasing Shadows
This animation, made from raw images received on June 22, brings us on a flight above Saturn’s B and A rings looking down over the 3,000-mile wide Cassini Division, following the elongated shadow of a moon cast upon – and through – the ring material. The different densities of the ring segments are made apparent…
Final Frame
This haunting photo is the last image sent back by Japan’s KAGUYA probe before it crashed into the lunar surface at the end of its mission on June 10, 2009. A tiny sliver of sunlight illuminates the rocky rim of a crater as the probe’s high-definition camera stares into the pitch black lunar shadows below….
Cast Shadow
The shadow of Mimas falls across the Cassini Division in this beautiful natural color, wide-angle view from Cassini’s camera. Views like these are possible only once every 15 years, as Saturn’s spring and autumn equinoxes bring its rings and moons into horizontal alignment with the equitorial plane of the solar system and the light of…
A River Runs Through It
…or has very recently, geologically speaking. But that river would be of liquid methane, not water. And it would be hundreds of degrees below zero. And it would be on Saturn’s moon Titan. This topographic radar image, taken by Cassini during a flyby of the moon on May 21, pierced the dense clouds of Titan…
Up, Up, and Away!
I don’t know what else to say except that this is pretty much the freakin’ coolest thing I’ve seen in a while. And you know that Lights in the Dark specializes in pretty freakin’ cool things. 😉 At 5:32 PM EST on Thursday, June 18, the Atlas V rocket carrying the new Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter…
The Prodigal Sunspot
Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research have released this stunning image, a high-resolution computer model of a sunspot, created over a period of several weeks by a supercomputer performing at a rate of 76 trillion calculations per second. This is, to date, the most…
Dark Shadows
A sliver of a shadow, thousands of miles long, slices into the twilight side of Saturn’s rings and drifts off the edge of the A ring in this 8-frame animation. (Click the image to play.) As well as the motion of the moon shadow, thicker sections of the F ring can be seen moving along…
Poll Position
Because I’m all about my readers, I’d like to know what you’d like to see here on Lights in the Dark! I try to find the most recent and visually interesting images from the various robotic missions around our solar system to post every day, but if there’s nothing new or particularly interesting to look…
Hail, Calypso
A lesser-known moon, Calypso orbits Saturn in the same path as Tethys and another miniature moon called Telesto. Known as the “Tethys Trojans”, these two oblong-shaped moons were discovered in 1980 by Earth-based telescopes and eventually photographed by Cassini. The moniker “trojan” in astronomy is reserved for satellites that orbit a planet in the same…
Devils’ Causeways
Like a child’s random scribblings, the tracks of countless dust devils trace dark swirls across the surface of Mars in a region called Russell Crater. Dust devils – caused by surface air heated during the day rising upwards in spinning columns – are extremely common on Mars and pick up the thin Martian sand easily,…
Meet the Clumps
87,000 miles from the cloudtops of Saturn’s equator writhes the hazy cords of the F ring, a braided belt of icy dust that shifts and twists around and over itself. Clumps of material gather together and separate, and make the thin ring vary in thickness anywhere from under 20 miles to over 300 miles wide….
Lights in the Dark 