One of the things that fascinates me so much about the Universe is the incredible vastness of scale, distance and size. On Earth we have virtually nothing to compare to the kinds of sizes seen in space. We look up at the stars and planets in the night sky but they are just bright points…
Slicing Saturn
In this beautiful image from Cassini we see a dramatically-lit Saturn, its rings slicing across its equator as a thin bright line and casting shadows onto its atmosphere below. A great example of how Saturn’s gigantic ring system is hundreds of thousands of miles wide but only about 30 feet thick! This image was captured…
The Sun’s Still At It!
‘Tis the season…the season for solar activity, that is! Last week was just the beginning, even though it saw some of the most powerful solar flares of the past four years send charged solar particles streaming toward Earth. Luckily our magnetosphere was in such a position to absorb much of it, creating some beautiful aurora…
Firing Off Flares
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Here’s a look at the activity on the Sun that’s gotten many talking about solar storms this week. Taken with the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s AIA 335 camera channel, which is sensitive to light emitted by Iron-14 ions in the Sun’s active corona layer, this video spans about two…
Tyche: Have We Marked the Spot of Planet X?
There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the existence of a “new” planet in our solar system, a gas giant that has eluded discovery by astronomers thus far because of its purported incredibly distant orbit – over 350 times farther from the Sun than Pluto, or a whopping 15,000 times farther from the Sun…
Shining Bright
Here’s a portrait of Enceladus, seen against a backdrop of Saturn’s atmosphere and ringplane seen edge-on. The ice-covered moon is one of the most reflective bodies in the solar system, bouncing back nearly all the sunlight that strikes it. Enceladus’ surface contains many different kinds of terrain, from older heavily-cratered regions to smoother, newer…
New Images of Tempel 1!
This just in! Cropped and sharpened via high pass slightly by yours truly. More to come! ADDED: Here’s another! Nice lighting here! (I removed some motion blur from this one via Photoshop.) And another (nice resolution here): See more images on the Stardust mission page here. Remember….they’re looking for whatever did this. Could it be…
First Image of Tempel 1
The first image taken by Stardust-NExT as it approached Tempel 1, the comet’s nucleus in clear view but still rather far away. Luckily the comet was centered in the field of view for all the images, but it will take some time to get to the closer-pass images in the download stack. (The 5 closest-pass…
From the LITD Archives: Voyager’s Valentine
On February 14, 1990, after nearly 13 years of traveling the outer solar system the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed the orbit of Pluto and turned its camera around to take a series of photos of the planets. The image above shows those photos, isolated from the original series and labeled left to right, top to…
A Solar Bullet
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Around 12:38 pm EST today, an energetic sunspot region on the Sun released a flare in our direction. The video above, a crop from an SDO AIA 171 mpeg, shows the shifting coronal loops surrounding sunspot 1158 as it rotates into view over the past day or so….
Happy Birthday to LITD!
Today is Lights in the Dark’s second birthday! I published my first post two years ago today, in an attempt to carry on what Bill Dunford had started with his similarly-themed blog Riding With Robots. When Bill had to step away from his blogging for a while, I asked if he’d be cool with me…
Tempel of Love
This Valentine’s Day – that’s Monday, guys! – NASA’s Stardust spacecraft will have an out-of-this-world date with a heavenly body: the comet Tempel 1, seen above in an image mosaic taken by the Deep Impact spacecraft nearly six years ago. On July 4, 2005, Deep Impact made a rendezvous with Tempel 1, passing as…
Lights in the Dark 