The bright “fireball” on Jupiter captured on camera the morning of June 3 by amateur astronomers Anthony Wesley and Christopher Go (a still image from Anthony’s video is above, rotated and cropped) is now believed to have been a meteor burning up high in the planet’s atmosphere, and not an impact like the July 2009…
Ultra Magnetism
Revealed in extreme ultraviolet light, our sun’s looping magnetic field lines are visible (watch in HD!) in this video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite. The action spans a two-day period from June 6 – 7, 2010, and features two particularly magnetically-active regions on the sun’s surface. Superheated solar material is caught up in…
This Week in Space
New look inside shuttle, Falcon 9 causes UFO stir, Japanese Hayabusa returns from asteroid mission, Korean rocket explodes, and more… Provided by SpaceflightNow.com. (Can’t view the video above? Watch on YouTube here.)
A World of Secrets
Wrapped in its clouds and haze Saturn’s moon Titan teases us with its secrets. What sort of strange geologic events are happening on its surface? Volcanoes oozing water ice, natural gas rainstorms, rivers flowing with liquid methane into enormous glassy lakes, temperatures that would freeze most Earthly creatures solid within minutes. And now, the big…
Fo Sizzle
A beautiful photo by Alan Friedman showing a solar prominence twisting high – as in, tens of thousands of miles high – above the surface of the Sun. This image was taken on June 2, 2010 through Friedman’s hydrogen alpha telescope. This allows us to see the complex texture of the Sun’s surface, called the…
Life on Titan?
There’s been a lot of buzz in the space news world recently about findings by NASA scientists that may indicate the possibility of some sort of biological activity on Saturn’s cloud-covered moon, Titan. This has been carried to many different levels of excitement, depending on the individual reporters…what has NOT been announced is anything definitive…
Wispy Lines
A closer look at the surface of Rhea, Saturn’s second-largest moon, reveals some of its signature “wispy lines”…the bright exposed faces of steep cliffs on the icy 950-mile-wide moon. Taken by the Cassini spacecraft on June 3, 2010, the image above has been level-adjusted to bring out surface details. Being composed of 75% water ice,…
Crater in Chaos
Here’s an intriguing image of a dune-filled crater on the edge of a plateau on Mars, taken by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on April 27, 2010. The heavily-eroded face of the plateau is the result of millennia of wind erosion, which most likely provided the source of the material which has…
Ring Racer
Man, I just LOVE this stuff. 🙂 This has to be one of the coolest images yet of one of my favorite subjects: Saturn’s moon Daphnis casting a shadow and riling up the rings as it travels along the 26-mile-wide Keeler Gap, a channel it keeps clear around the outer edge of the A ring….
Jupiter Impact Video
Hm hm hm…..*poof*…………..is that all you got? 🙂 Here’s a video of yesterday’s impact on Jupiter by whatever object was unfortunate enough to have a run-in with the gigantic planet. This was made by Anthony Wesley, the Australian astronomer who spotted the event as it happened through his custom telescope setup. Keep in mind that…
Jupiter Takes a Hit…Again!
Even as the Hubble team released the image above detailing the scars from the July 2009 asteroid impact on Jupiter, another object was on a collision course with our solar system’s giant planet…and Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley was at his station (yet again!) and captured an image of the impact! Read all about it…
Hyperion
Here’s a wonderful color mosaic of Saturn’s moon Hyperion, assembled by Gordan Ugarkovic from four Cassini narrow-angle camera images. The moon’s heavily cratered sponge-like surface can be seen in vivid detail due to the high phase angle of sunlight, making its rough texture even more pronounced. At 255 x 163 x 137 miles in diameter,…
Lights in the Dark 