On Jan. 30, the Cassini spacecraft executed a flyby maneuver of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, passing within 19,340 miles (31,130 km) of its surface. This color composite image of the cloud-covered moon was created by combining raw data acquired with Cassini’s Imaging Science System (ISS) in red, green, blue and clear color channels. The result…
Tag: moon
First GRAIL Video Shows Moon’s “Dark Side”
See you on the dark side of the Moon*! NASA’s GRAIL mission has beamed back its first video of the far side of the moon. The imagery was taken on Jan. 19 by the MoonKAM aboard the mission’s “Ebb” spacecraft. GRAIL consists of two identical spacecraft, recently named Ebb and Flow, each of which is…
Moonset Over The Atlantic
Awesomeness. No words necessary. Via the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. Video courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center.
From the LITD Archives: Eclipsing Mimas
Originally published on May 16, 2009. LITD is almost 3 years old! This animation, made from a series of 8 raw images taken by Cassini on May 14, shows Saturn’s moon Mimas being eclipsed by another object…..a neighboring moon, perhaps? It’s not mentioned, but it definitely seems to be something of similar size, and round….
ISS Performs a Lunar Pass
The right place at the right time… that’s all it took (along with some great camera skills!) for a NASA photographer at Johnson Space Center in Houston to capture some fantastic photos of the International Space Station (ISS) passing across the face of the moon! Read the rest of my article on Discovery News here.
The Colors of Titan’s Sky
Made from one of the most recent Cassini images, this is a color-composite showing a backlit Titan with its dense, multi-layered atmosphere scattering sunlight in different colors. Titan’s atmosphere is made up of methane and complex hydrocarbons and is ten times as thick as Earth’s. It is the only moon in our solar system known to have…
A December Moon
The midnight hour on December 11, 2011 brought a bright and vibrant halo around the Moon, not even 24 hours after its much-publicized total eclipse. It was all I could do to get my camera set up in time to snap a few photos; within the hour clouds rolled in and the effect was gone!…
The Gift of Apollo
Just watch this: “Once upon a time we soared into the Solar System, for a few years… then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was Apollo really about?” – Carl Edward Sagan, 1934–1996 Nothing more need be said.
A Backwards Moon
At 1,680 miles across, the frigid and wrinkled Triton is distant Neptune’s largest moon. It orbits the planet backwards – that is, in the opposite direction that Neptune rotates – and is the only moon one of only two moons in our solar system to do so. This leads many astronomers to believe that Triton is…
Goodnight Moon
Another stunning view from the Space Station, this photo was taken by Expedition 28 astronaut Ron Garan on July 31, 2011 and shows the Moon seeming to sink into the ocean of air that is our life-supporting atmosphere. As the Moon passes behind Earth’s limb it appears to get squished because of light being refracted…
Did Earth Once Have Two Moons?
Our Moon. It lights up our nights, governs our tides and has inspired millions — perhaps billions -– of people throughout history to contemplate its nature, its influence on our lives (if any) and, of course, where it may have come from. The currently accepted theory is that over four and a half billion years ago our…
Rolling Stones in the Lake of Death
No, it’s not the title of a B-movie starring Keith Richards, it’s an image of lunar boulders resting in a line within a valley on the Moon. This valley, located in the central peak of Bürg crater, is filled with boulders ranging up to 70 feet across that have rolled downhill from either side. The…
Lights in the Dark 