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…
Rivers of Sand
Ripples and waves of sediment undulate around stone mesas in this high-resolution (false-color) photo of a crater in Mars’ Arabia Terra, a region at the boundary of highland and lowland. These eroded escarpments are thought to be the shores of an ancient ocean. Now all that laps against them are these serpentine sand dunes….
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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