Holy ice spray! This image, released today, shows a dramatic view of Enceladus with geysers in full force, obtained by Cassini while the sun (behind Enceladus) backlit the geysers and reflected light off Saturn illuminated the face of the moon. There couldn’t be a better lighting setup for a scenario like this! In a word:…
Tag: astronomy
Mercury’s Special Scarps
The 300-mile-long long channel cutting across craters on Mercury in this image from MESSENGER was first identified in October of 2008, giving scientists clues to a geologic history found nowhere else in our solar system. Deep cracks like this, found all over the planet, are thought to be caused by the contraction of Mercury as…
Lunar Hues
Look up at the moon on any clear night and you’ll see a cratered world shining down on you, in some phase of illumination or perhaps even full and round, with a few lighter or darker areas but for the most part all in cool, bright shades of whites and greys. The moon’s real colors…
Spot On
Skillfully reworked by astrophotographer and Unmanned Spaceflight member Björn Jónsson, this section from a Voyager 1 image mosaic shows the Great Red Spot as it appeared in March of 1979 in amazing detail…with sunlight coming from the right side, the sense of the clouds really being three-dimensional and that you’re looking down through layers and…
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…
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…
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 