The line of Saturn’s edge – or “limb” – glows brightly with backlit sunlight, as do its rings, in this wonderful image from Cassini, color-calibrated by Gordan Ugarkovic. Beige and blue colors can be seen in the layers of Saturn’s upper atmosphere, and the distant arc of the rings seem to sink into this before…
Tag: astronomy
A Saturn-Sized Storm
Earlier this week the Cassini spacecraft captured this image of an eddying storm in Saturn’s northern hemisphere. Nearly as large as the Earth, the bright clouds have been visible to amateur astronomers for several weeks and on December 27 Cassini was able to get a nice view of its own from orbit! Fantastic. See more…
Backlit Dione
Here’s a beautiful new image just in from Cassini: the silhouette of 700-mile-wide Dione seen against the sunlit limb of Saturn, its rings seen edge-on just above the moon. Some of Dione’s heavily-cratered terrain can be discerned along its southeastern edge. I particularly like the light halo effects along the edges of the moon and…
When the Moon hits your eye…
Last night’s beautiful lunar eclipse – the first one occurring on the winter solstice in 426 years! – had the Moon at one point tinted a coppery-red and floating in the night sky amongst the stars…it almost felt like you could reach up and pluck it from the sky! It was wonderfully surreal. Without a…
On the Edge of Santa Maria
Opportunity has finally made it to the edge of her latest observation target: the crater named “Santa Maria”!
The Many Faces of Enceladus
A recently uploaded raw image from Cassini, this is a full-frontal view of 318-mile-wide Enceladus taken on November 30, 2010 during the spacecraft’s most recent flyby. Of particular note here is the moon’s heavily grooved and fractured surface, mostly water ice and rock, but strangely split into two sections of differing terrain – most noticeably…
Ditches, Devils and Dunes
There’s a lot going on in this image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera…swirling dust devil tracks paint dark streaks over the sand dunes within Russell Crater (click here for a larger view of the region) while long “peculiar” ditches run snakelike down the crater’s sloped walls. Click the image above for a…
Sunny Face
The most recent (7:15 pm CST 12-10-2010) AIA image of the Sun by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Looks like a face. 🙂 That is all. Image courtesy SDO (NASA) and the AIA consortium. (Oh, and congrats to the SDO team for their image being chosen as one of LIFE’s pictures of the year! w00tw00t!)
Like Ships in the Night – Akatsuki Sails Right Past Venus
So close, but yet so far. In a poignant farewell, Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft returned this image of Venus as it sped off into space, its attempt at establishing orbit having failed on Wednesday, December 8. The $300 million scientific observatory was created to study the atmosphere of our neighboring planet, as well as use its…
Dione and Tethys in Passing
Two of Saturn’s moons pass each other from Cassini’s perspective on December 6, 2010, in this animation compiled from 70 raw image files. This was more an experiment in using iMovie HD to create an animation from a lot of individual images than anything else…I didn’t take the time to clean up the specks and…
Rocky Shadows
Piles of boulders cast long shadows in the floor of the 18.6-mile (30 km) wide Necho crater on our moon. This dramatically-lit image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) shows the final result of a large impact on the lunar surface, and gives a nice example of some of the rugged terrain that can…
A Transient Transit
Almost forgotten today in all the excitement over the giant prominence seen by SDO, the Moon also had a small role to play over the weekend: its lunar transit of the Sun in front of SDO’s cameras! Although brief and not captured by all the AIA instruments, AIA 304 did manage to glimpse a peek…
Lights in the Dark 