Here’s a processed image of Opportunity’s latest point-of-interest, the toaster-sized iron meteorite Oileán Ruidh (Gaelic for “Red Island”, pronounced “ay-lan ru-ah”) by Stuart Atkinson. This pitted, metallic chunk of rock is the subject of the rover’s most recent side trip on its way to Endeavour crater, whose mountainous rim is now well within sight across…
Titan’s High-Level Haze
Composite RGB spectral data image from Cassini’s latest flyby of Titan, September 24, 2010. Not much image adjustment needed, this was basically “out of the box”! I love the coloration in the different atmospheric layers. Original raw image can be seen here. Image: NASA/JPL/SSI. Edited by J. Major. Flickr – Photo Sharing!
Prominence Earth
A serpentine solar prominence snakes thousands of miles through space towards an unsuspecting Earth! This apocalyptic sci-fi scene is made up of two combined images of the sun from NASA’s SDO sapcecraft, acquired today September 25, 2010, superimposed and edited to show both surface (chromosphere) detail as well as coronal features, and an image of…
A Frozen Veil
A crescent-lit Enceladus ejects a frozen mist of water ice into space in this image, a combination of three raw files captured by the Cassini orbiter on September 22, 2010. At this high phase angle the jets become visible as the icy particles brightly reflect the sunlight passing almost directly through them towards Cassini’s lens….
A Salty Tail
Sometimes the line between “planet” and “comet” can get a little blurry…especially in Mercury’s case! This video, taken by NASA’s two-piece STEREO (Solar Terrestrial RElations Observatory) spacecraft – consisting of one unit orbiting the Sun just ahead of the Earth and another behind – shows Mercury over a four-day period, shining brightly in the solar…
Dust ‘Til Dawn
This image shows a view of Mars taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in August of 2001, after a planetwide storm had completely covered it with windblown dust as fine as cigarette smoke. (The image has been color-edited and magnified 2x from the original by Gordan Ugarkovic.) These dust storms can arise unexpectedly and at…
Plume Zoom
Check this piece of coolness out… it’s an animation made of 30 frames of raw image data captured by Cassini during its August 13th flyby of Enceladus. It shows the little moon’s signature ice plumes erupting from fissures in the surface of its south pole as the spacecraft approaches. Neato!!! I saw it on The…
Some Craters are the Pits
Look inside a 300-foot-deep pit on the Moon
Shades of Saturn
Taken from a distance of over 1.5 million miles, this is a color-composite image of Saturn made by combining raw RGB spectral data captured on September 10, 2010 by the Cassini spacecraft. I love the cool blues, pale purples, barely-perceptable sea greens and warm sandy tans that tint the separate ascending and descending latitudes of…
Life Imitates Art
Here’s a beautiful photo taken by a crew member aboard the International Space Station showing the crescent moon above Earth’s atmosphere, a hazy band of bright blue separating our world of life from the inhospitable harshness of space. An amazing shot, but what’s even cooler about it is that it looks remarkably like an illustration…
Colors of the Rings
With Saturn in eclipse, the rings show off their colors in this image from Cassini taken on September 3, 2010. I assembled this image from three raw files taken with Cassini’s red, green and blue color filters. Some sharpening was applied and the resulting file doubled in pixel size. At the bottom of the image Saturn’s…
Details of Dione
Here’s some awesome just-released raw images from Cassini’s flyby of Dione earlier this morning! The low angle of sunlight brings out the detail of the moon’s rugged terrain, peppered with ancient craters of all sizes and gouged by long scars of steep, icy cliffs. Fantastic! Thanks to team leader Carolyn Porco for alerting us to…
Lights in the Dark 