On February 14, 1990, after nearly 13 years of traveling the outer solar system the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed the orbit of Pluto and turned its camera around to take a series of photos of the planets. The image above shows those photos, isolated from the original series and labeled left to right, top to…
Tag: astronomy
A WISE Discovery
It’s small and faint and blurry but it’s definitely there… the first comet identified by WISE, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. At the center of the image is a fuzzy red dot. This dot is a 1.2-mile-wide ball of water ice and rock dubbed P/2010 B2 (WISE) – or just Comet WISE for short –…
Signs of a Hidden Sea
Cassini mission scientists have more support for the existence of an underground ocean on Enceladus, in the form of negatively-charged ions present in the moon’s southern ice geysers. In a report released February 8, 2009, the Cassini Science League announced that researchers have identified these ions using the spacecraft’s plasma spectrometer data from recent flybys…
Shear Delight
Monstrous eddies in Saturn’s upper atmosphere are clearly visible in this near-infrared image from Cassini, taken in November 2009 and released on NASA’s planetary Photojournal on February 4. Winds on Saturn are some of the fastest in the solar system, blowing around the planet in opposing bands at speeds of several hundreds of miles per…
Carnival of Space #140
Welcome! I’m very honored to host the 140th edition of Carnival of Space here on Lights in the Dark, especially considering that this week marks this site’s one-year anniversary! It’s really been a fascinating year for me. I’ve had a lot of fun finding and featuring images from the various missions exploring our solar system…from…
Night Moves
After some delays over the weekend, this morning Endeavour lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in what was officially the last nighttime launch of the space shuttle. Watch the video of the liftoff and rocket separation below, recorded from NASA TV. The STS-130 mission carries the Tranquillity module to the International Space Station and the…
Moons Near and Far…and More to Come!
246-mile-wide Mimas (foreground) and 70-mile-wide Epimetheus bracket a section of Saturn’s rings in this color-calibrated image from the Cassini spacecraft, taken in October 2009. Happily, we can expect to see beautiful images like this for another 7 years…NASA has extended the Cassini mission until at least 2017! During that time Cassini will transition into its…
A Patchwork Pluto
The New Horizons spacecraft may still be several years away from its flyby of the outermost ex-planet, but the Hubble Space Telescope is meanwhile grabbing glimpses of the frozen world at the edge of our solar system. The video above is composed of hundreds of individual images of Pluto, assembled over the course of four…
Fire in the Sky
Around 6pm local time, February 3 2009, a large fireball was seen in the evening skies over Ireland. First video of the blazing meteor can be seen above. Reports are coming in that the “desk-sized” meteor may have landed in a field. It may be a piece of a larger object that exploded in the…
“X” Marks the Spot
With a long trail of material streaming out into space one would assume this to be a photo of a comet…but it’s not. Rather, it’s believed to be the result of a collision between two asteroids that produced a weird X-shaped pattern of filaments emanating from a small remnant object. Material from the filaments has…
Work Well Done
A poignant entry on xkcd.com, a webcomic by Randall Munroe. This is based on the recent news that the rover named Spirit will now officially be a “stationary science platform”. After repeated attempts to dislodge it from its current location, wheels hopelessly embedded in soft sand in a locale called “Troy”, the decision was made…
Hello, Neighbor
On Friday, January 29, Mars was in opposition and appeared very bright in the eastern sky, near the Moon. The photograph above was shot and color-calibrated by photographer Alan Friedman from his location in Buffalo, New York. The bright north polar ice cap is clearly visible, as are some darker surface features and wispy clouds….
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