Here’s a beautiful photo taken by a crew member aboard the International Space Station showing the crescent moon above Earth’s atmosphere, a hazy band of bright blue separating our world of life from the inhospitable harshness of space. An amazing shot, but what’s even cooler about it is that it looks remarkably like an illustration…
Tag: atmosphere
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…
Thin Blue Line
The setting sun lights up the the neon blue line of Earth’s atmosphere in this photo taken by the crew of the International Space Station during the STS-129 shuttle mission. Click for the full-size view. The darkness of space above and a dark night on Earth below, this “thin blue line” is all that exists…
South Pacific
Another beautiful image of Earth from the Rosetta spacecraft’s OSIRIS imaging system, showing swirling clouds in an anticyclone over the South Pacific. The false-color composite is a portion of a larger view of the planet, taken as Rosetta flew by Earth on November 13. It is a combination of image data taken through the orange,…
The Ring
No, it’s not the final frame of a haunted videotape…it’s a backlit Titan, silhouetted against the sun, photographed by Cassini from over 850,000 miles away. Titan’s upper-level atmospheric haze is illuminated in this image, surrounding the moon high above the cloudtops. The haze is a mixture of complex hydrocarbons created by the breakdown of methane…
Hazed and Diffused
Cassini captured this intriguing glimpse into Titan’s thick haze during its latest flyby. Made up of complex hydrocarbons, formed from the breakdown of methane by solar radiation, this pale blue shroud extends hundreds of miles above the moon’s surface…ten times thicker, in fact, than our own atmosphere. This is a raw image from the…
Clementine: Lost and Gone Forever, But Never Forgotten!
One of my all-time favorite space images is this little gem from the Clementine mission to the Moon, launched in January of 1994. It features a view from beyond the far side of the Moon, illuminated by reflected light off the Earth off frame to the left, blocking the disc of the Sun with the solar corona…
Eddies and Whirls
Storms of varying sizes churn in Saturn’s northern hemisphere in this true-color image taken by the Cassini orbiter on November 29, 2008. The reason for the blue color is still not known, but it seems to fade with the winter season coming to an end. This photo was taken from a distance of 683,000 miles…
Lights in the Dark 