Here’s your weekly Ceres update! The dwarf planet’s features are coming into better and better focus for the approaching Dawn spacecraft, which will be captured by Ceres’ gravity on March 6. The image above is yet another “best-ever” of Ceres (as will be each one we see now), captured on Feb. 19, 2015, from a distance of…
Tag: dwarf planet
Hello, Ceres! Dwarf Planet’s Features Come Into Focus
Won’t you look at that! Here’s a view of Ceres captured by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft on Feb. 12, 2015, from a distance of about 52,000 miles (83,000 km). No longer just a grey sphere with some vague bright spots, actual features can now be resolved – craters, mountains, and scarps that quite literally no one has ever…
Dawn Captures the Bestest Images Ever of “Hipster Planet” Ceres
This is the second animation from Dawn this year showing Ceres rotating, and at 43 pixels across the images are officially the best ever obtained! NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is now on final approach to the 590-mile-wide dwarf planet Ceres, the largest world in the main asteroid belt and the biggest object in the inner Solar System that has yet to…
Hello, Ceres! Dawn Returns Images of Dwarf Planet Spinning
Wow, check this out! The 590-mile-wide dwarf planet Ceres is seen rotating in this GIF animation made from the latest images from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, taken over the course of an hour on January 13, 2015. Dawn was 238,000 miles (383,000 km) from Ceres when the images were taken, and although only 27 pixels across…
New Horizons Captures Pluto and Charon Orbiting
Whether you think Pluto is a planet, a dwarf planet, a Kuiper Belt Object – or something else entirely – you should still be fascinated by this: a video of the dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon Charon showing the two distinctly separate worlds actually in motion around each other! Captured by the New…
New Horizons’ First Look at Pluto’s Big Moon
The two bright clusters of pixels in the image above might not seem like much of a big deal, but they are… those two blocky blobs are the dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, as seen by the rapidly-approaching New Horizons spacecraft, destined for its ultimate close encounter in July 2015! This represents…
Our Sharpest (Ground-Based) View of Pluto Yet:
Real planet, dwarf planet, KBO… who cares? What matters here is that astronomers from NASA, NOAO and the Gemini Observatory have created the sharpest image of Pluto ever made with ground-based observations — and developed a new way to verify potential Earth-like exoplanets at the same time. Not too shabby, I’d say. Here’s how they…
Why Did Pluto Lose Its Planet Status?
Why isn’t Pluto considered a planet anymore?
Pluto: The Biggest Dwarf
There’s a size war being waged at the outskirts of our solar system, and it looks like Pluto may come out as the reigning champ. Ever since its discovery in 2003, the dwarf planet Eris — located in the Kuiper Belt of frozen worlds far beyond the orbit of Pluto — has been a key…
Lights in the Dark 