Long shadows are cast by sunlit boulders crowding a hill in Anaxagoras crater on the Moon. This image taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) shows an area known as an impact melt – a result of the original collision that created the 50-kilometer-wide crater. Because of the lack of obvious large impacts in…
Tag: moon
From the LITD Archives: Sinking the Shot
Alan Shepard may have played some moon golf during his visit in 1971 but even he wouldn’t have been up to par with this course. 😉 This photo shows the trail of a house-sized (33-foot-wide) lunar boulder that has rolled downhill and come to rest inside the rim of a crater. The image was taken…
A Fan of Shadows
Cassini captured this visible-light image on October 16, 2010, showing a thick clump of icy material in Saturn’s bright F ring casting a “fan” of thin shadows. Clumps like this have been seen many times before and may be caused by the gravitational effects of passing shepherd moons like Prometheus or as-of-yet undiscovered moonlets within the ropy…
From the LITD Archives: A Primordial Moon
A beautiful Cassini color-composite by Gordan Ugarkovic, this false-color image shows the ancient and heavily-cratered surface of Saturn’s moon Phoebe. Irregularly-shaped and bout 132 miles across, Phoebe is a fifteenth the size of our own moon but is believed to be much, much older. With its retrograde (backwards) orbit, high orbital incline and extremely dark,…
iseefaces…on the Moon!
This mound – with craters positioned facelike on its top, including a central peak crater – is located along the edge of the Moon’s Eddington crater, an ancient lava-filled basin on the central western limb. Imaged by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in January, this 1.5km-wide mound may be the remnants of a volcano. Or it…
Look Inside a Lunar Crater
The crater shown above is located in the lunar highlands and is filled with and surrounded by boulders of all sizes and shapes. It is approximately 550 meters (1800 feet) wide yet is still considered a small crater, and could have been caused by either a direct impact by a meteorite or by an ejected…
Last Night’s Moon
Crescent Moon w/Earthshine, originally uploaded by Lights In The Dark. The Moon looked especially nice last night (April 5), crescent-lit at dusk and the rest illuminated by cool blue Earthshine! (That’s sunlight reflected off the Earth and onto the Moon…and then back to the Earth to our eyes!) The image above was taken without a…
Craters Young and Old
This image from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) shows two similarly-sized craters in the Oceanus Procellarum (“Sea of Storms”) region of the Moon – a large mare on the Earth-facing side, on the northwestern edge. One crater is surrounded and covered by boulders and debris, denoting its young age compared to the smooth,…
Northern Exposure
Cassini gets a nice look at Enceladus’ icy, cratered north pole in this image, taken on December 21, 2010. In the background we catch a glimpse of Saturn’s rings as well! Fantastic image. The Cassini spacecraft was about 20,000 miles (34000 km) from Enceladus when this was taken, using its narrow-angle camera. 318 miles across…
Shining Bright
Here’s a portrait of Enceladus, seen against a backdrop of Saturn’s atmosphere and ringplane seen edge-on. The ice-covered moon is one of the most reflective bodies in the solar system, bouncing back nearly all the sunlight that strikes it. Enceladus’ surface contains many different kinds of terrain, from older heavily-cratered regions to smoother, newer…
Looking Into a Lunar Cave
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter recently got a glimpse into a previously-imaged pit in a region called Marius Hills. An oblique view combined with angled sunlight gave a peek into what seems to be a lunar cave, or at least some sort of overhang at the bottom of the pit! Previous images were completely dark, illuminating…
Dione’s Wispy Cliffs
First spotted by the Voyager spacecraft thirty years ago, it wasn’t until Cassini that the linear features criscrossing Saturn’s moon Dione known as “wispy lines” were confirmed to be the icy faces of high cliff walls rising hundreds of feet from the moon’s frozen surface. Possibly caused by tectonic activity Dione’s cliff walls shine brightly…
Lights in the Dark 