Here’s a look at the frozen crater Cilix, a rare ice-filled dent in the scoured and resurfaced face of Europa. Taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1998, this image has been reassembled from raw data and color-calibrated by Gordan Ugarkovic to highlight the surface detail of this fascinating frozen cueball of a moon. Covered by…
Tag: astronomy
Equinox Revisited
Here’s a beautiful color portrait of Saturn taken by Cassini during the planet’s 2009 spring equinox last August. Approximately every fifteen years Saturn is angled so that the light from the sun strikes it straight-on, causing the shadows cast by the rings to appear as a pencil-thin line along its equator. The Cassini spacecraft happened…
A Cassini Composition
Cassini took this beautiful image of a crescent-lit Enceladus shadowed against Saturn’s silhouette during Friday’s flyby, demonstrating once again its uncanny ability to capture wonderfully-composed shots that illustrate the inherent beauty of our family of planets. Enceladus is the now-famous moon with “jet-power”…continually erupting geysers spray water ice out into space from long “tiger stripe”…
Lutetia in the Limelight
On the night of Saturday, July 10, 2010, ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft passed by the 80-plus-mile-wide asteroid Lutetia at a distance of less than 2000 miles, and retured a series of wonderfully detailed images of this intriguing little member of our solar system. The image above, cropped and rotated 90º, shows Lutetia’s cratered surface, covered with…
An Icy Crescent
A color-composite image of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, assembled from RGB raw image data recorded by Cassini on July 4, 2010. The moon’s heavily textured and highly-reflective icy terrain is nicely accentuated by the low angle of sunlight. The Cassini spacecraft was over 104,000 miles from Enceladus when the images were taken. Image: NASA/JPL/SSI. Edited by…
Moons, Moons Everywhere
Released today, this image shows one of many small (half-mile wide) moons that orbit Saturn within the rings themselves, creating a “propellers” of gravitationally-tugged ring particles on either side of it. The Cassini team has been watching these interesting ring features for some time, and has carefully tracked eleven of the larger ones over the…
This Week in Space
Season 1, episode 23: SpaceX issues a financial challenge to the big space contractors, last shuttle launches slip, video diary from Mars 500 crew, IKAROS’ successful solar sail, kids discover Martian cave, John Glenn joins the save shuttle fray, Cassini takes a dip in Titan’s atmosphere, new Hubble images show star formation, extreme exoplanet weather,…
This Week in Space
Season 1, episode 22: Miles is back this week with a new way to track world shipping, Soyuz launch to ISS, former NASA admin Griffin has kind words about SpaceX’s Elon Musk, the results are in from Kepler’s first days of planet hunting, men locked up for 17 months to simulate Mars mission and a…
Coronal Loops
Seen in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths, bright coronal loops erupt from the edges of a sunspot in this image, a detail of a larger image captured by the SDO spacecraft earlier today. (Click to see the full-sized version.) Coronal loops are plasma-filled “tubes” that arc upwards from the Sun’s surface and reconnect at both ends. They…
VLT: A Space Opera
Here’s an enchanting video by the European Southern Observatory highlighting the discoveries of their Very Large Telescope (VLT) array, high in the mountains of the Atacama Desert in Chile. The Atacama is the driest place on Earth, far from the light pollution of major cities, and thus provides the clearest, darkest skies allowing these massive…
Meteor? Darn near killed ‘er.
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…
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…
Lights in the Dark 