Here’s an image that always blows my mind: it’s our planet as seen by the exploration rover Spirit on March 8, 2004, 63 Martian days into its mission. It’s the first image of Earth taken from the surface of another planet. The official description says: The image is a mosaic of images taken by the…
Tag: astronomy
A Giant Among Moons
Our solar system’s largest moon, Ganymede. © Ted Stryk. With so much focus these days on Saturn’s many varied moons, I thought I’d post a beautiful image of Jupiter’s lesser-seen – but anything but lesser-sized – moon, Ganymede. The largest of Jupiter’s 63 named moons – as well as the largest moon in our…
Enceladus and the Rings
Here’s a surreal image of ice-covered Enceladus with Saturn’s rings in the background, as seen by Cassini on November 30, 2010 during its latest flyby. Amazing! The spacecraft was about 28,500 miles (45,827 km) away from Enceladus when this image was taken. I adjusted the levels a bit to bring out some detail in the…
Spray It, Don’t Say It
Cassini’s done it again…images of Enceladus’ south-pole jets in all their icy glory are in from yesterday’s flyby! The one shown here, a raw image that I’ve rotated 180º (so south is “down”) shows the moon lit partly by sunlight (the sliver of white crescent along the left) and partly by “Saturnshine” (reflected sunlight off…
Fear a-Flying
Part of a bulk data release from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter (available at ftp://psa.esac.esa.int/pub/mirror/MARS-EXPRESS/HRSC, posted on unmannedspaceflight.com by user peter59) this wonderful image shows Phobos, the larger of Mars’ two moons, in orbit against the backdrop of the planet’s limb. The dark, irregularly-shaped moon is shown in amazing clarity, giving a very nice…
Where the Sun Don’t Shine
There are places surprisingly close by that are the coldest known spots in the entire solar system: on our Moon’s south pole lie deep craters that never receive direct sunlight, in fact have never seen the Sun, and within these craters lie pockets of ice that contain the same frozen material they’ve had since forming…
A Sinuous Strand
Featured on the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s Pick of the Week, this image from the observatory’s AIA 304 camera shows a gigantic filament snaking around the Sun’s southern hemisphere, hundreds of thousands of miles of magnetically-contained plasma made visible in extreme ultraviolet light. Filaments are bands of relatively cooler, denser solar material caught up in magnetic…
Waiting for Cassini
Color portrait of Saturn from Cassini It’s no secret to anyone who’s been following my posts these last couple of years…images from the Cassini mission are my personal favorites and make up more than half of all my posts. So you can imagine my dismay when Cassini went into a “safe” mode over the past…
Earthshine
It may look like a science fiction film but it’s very much science reality: a view from the window of the International Space Station, taken on November 7 by astronaut Doug Wheelock, shows external structures lit by a cool blue light reflected off our planet – “Earthshine” – while the bright crescent of dawn blooms…
Spaceballs!
Holy interplanetary snowstorm! This image, a focused (“deconvolved”) view of comet Hartley 2 which was approached by NASA’s EPOXI spacecraft on November 4, shows a swarm of specks surrounding an ice-spraying, boulder-crusted nucleus. Those specks aren’t stars, they’re golfball- to basketball-sized balls of loosely-packed ice particles… a.k.a snowballs! And comet Hartley-2 is literally surrounded by them…
Lovely Leonids
It was cloudy in my neck of the woods last night so I missed any Leonids I would have seen (not to mention the ever-present bubble of light that surrounds my city), but it was nice and clear where my friend Li Kim lives and she was enthusiastic enough to get out and capture some…
Just Passing By
Holy lunar photobomb, Batman! In another brief occultation event the Moon snuck in front of SDO’s cameras on Saturday, November 6, this time passing across the orbiting observatory’s view of the Sun’s southern pole and southeastern limb in a diagonal motion. This happened previously on October 7… seems like the Moon doesn’t much like being…
Lights in the Dark 