It’s been a while since I posted one of these…it’s an animation made up of 16 raw images from the Cassini spacecraft, taken on March 12, showing Saturn’s moons Dione and Titan passing each other. The small, cratered and frozen Dione couldn’t be more different than her much larger, haze-enshrouded sister Titan, but we’re reminded…
Tag: astronomy
Alone in the Universe
What’s it like to step through the hatch of a space shuttle and look out into the universe? The reality of it is deceptively incomprehensible to most, but Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield gives an amazing first-person description of his spacewalk experience to Universe Today’s Nancy Atkinson in this article. Check it out, he really stirs…
This Week in Space
The new IMAX: Hubble 3D astronaut stars and launch party at the Air and Space Museum in DC takes center stage in this edition of This Week in Space with Miles O’Brien. Also, the president prepares to support his new plans for NASA and the shuttle mission may get a stay of execution (as long…
Heeeere’s Phobos!
After much anticipation, this just in: an amazingly detailed image from the March 7 flyby of Phobos! As Phil Plait might say, click to emphobosize. 😉 See more info and a couple more similar images on the ESA’s Mars Express site. Phobos sure has an interesting surface texture. It’s almost as if boulders have been…
Fatal Attraction
This video from SOHO spanning several days’ worth of time shows the activity of the Sun’s corona as stellar energy is streamed out into space against a passing background field of stars…and then right in the final moments we see it: the bright trail of a comet as it makes its final journey straight into…
The Tao of Iapetus
With a leading side dark as charcoal and trailing side bright white, the 914-mile-wide Iapetus is literally the yin-and-yang of Saturn’s family of moons. The color variation on Iapetus is due to the fine coating of dark material that falls onto its leading hemisphere, possibly sent its way by smaller, distant Phoebe traveling within the…
A Pack of Spokes
Typically, spokes in Saturn’s rings – temporary, shifting bands of material that transect the rings lengthwise – appear as bright streaks when seen from high phase angles but they show up here as subtle dark bands in this low-angle image from Cassini, taken January 27. Some of the brighter rings on the right half of…
Holy Dione
The heavily creased and cratered face of 700-mile-wide Dione is partially lit by the Sun in this image from Cassini, taken on March 4. Some of the moon’s characteristic “wispy lines” can be seen along its sunlit limb…these are the bright, exposed walls of icy canyons caused by ancient tectonic activity. The darker surface material…
This Week in Space
Buzz muses on the next steps for NASA (and his upcoming stint on “Dancing with the Stars”), the Space Coast braces for lay-offs, new proof of lunar ice, Discovery heads (slowly) to the launch pad, Mars’s potentially-hollow moon Phobos gets a close-up, revisiting a comet, windy black holes, blue marbles, icebergs and more on this…
Portrait of Io
Here’s a beautiful high-resolution portrait of Io by Jason Perry, assembled from Galileo images taken in 1999 and posted to The Gish Bar Times, his website dedicated to Jupiter’s volcanic moon. Check out the link for a labeled version of the image as well as details on how it was created. Slightly larger than our…
Ice World
662-mile-wide Tethys, as seen by Cassini on March 3, 2010. Part of the 1200-mile-long Ithaca Chasma can be seen on its western edge, running north to south. With a density .97 times that of liquid water, Tethys is almost completely made of ice. Image has been adjusted to bring out surface details. Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science…
Hello, Helene!
On March 3 the Cassini spacecraft flew by the 22-mile-wide Helene, an irregularly-shaped moon orbiting Saturn in the same path as the much larger Dione. Cassini was about 1,200 miles from the moon when this image was taken. See more photos of Helene on the Cassini imaging center website here. Image: NASA/JPL/SSI
Lights in the Dark 