Watch as a huge cloud of ash bursts into the upper atmosphere from Iceland’s Grímsvötn volcano in this sequence of images taken by NASA’s GOES-13 weather observation satellite. The oblique angle of illumination and position along the edge of the globe emphasizes the incredible vertical scale of the eruption. (Click to play.) Grímsvötn erupted on…
Tag: NASA
Up, Up and Away!
The space shuttle Endeavour lifted off from Cape Canaveral for the final time on the morning of Monday, May 16 2011, and quickly pierced through the low cloud cover, disappearing from view for many observers on the ground but not for those high above in a NASA weather reconnaissance aircraft! They had quite the view…
Three Weeks on Jupiter
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Check out this fascinating new-and-improved video of Jupiter’s swirling cloud belts in action, made up of Voyager 1 image data acquired from January 6 through January 29, 1979. Digital artist Björn Jónsson assembled this high-definition animation from 58 images skillfully color-composited and tweened together to create a smooth video….
A First Look at an Asteroid
Ever wonder what an asteroid would look like from three-quarters of a million miles away? Well, here ya go. 🙂 This image, a processed version of the original, shows the true size of the 330-mile-wide asteroid Vesta as seen by the approaching Dawn spacecraft on May 3, 2011. The original image contained a lot of…
Cool Cassini Capture: Pandora
Cassini took this raw image of the 50-mile (81-km) -wide moon Pandora on May 7, 2011. The oval-shaped shepherd moon orbits Saturn just outside the F ring. Saturn’s long shadow is cast over the central portion of the rings in this image. Credit: NASA / JPL / Space Science Institute
Light This Candle
“Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?” – Alan B. Shepard, Jr., to Mission Control after delays during his four-hour sit atop the Mercury-Redstone rocket. May 5, 1961. On this day in 1961, fifty years ago, a 10-story Mercury-Redstone 3 rocket ignited at Cape Canaveral, Florida, successfully launching the first American into…
Shocking News About Saturn’s Moon
Scientists have uncovered a shocking surprise about Saturn’s ice-spewing satellite Enceladus: the little 318-mile-wide moon creates a loop of electrically-charged particles that run from its north and south poles all the way up and over to Saturn’s north and south poles, forming a giant electron beam connecting the gas planet and its icy moon. Where the…
SDO: Year One
Can’t see the video below? Click here. One year ago today, on April 21, 2010, NASA held a First Light press conference where the first images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory were presented to the public! Now here we are one year later and the images and video we have enjoyed these past 12 months…
Ring Racer (Take Two)
I came across this image today while going through the latest Cassini PDS (Planetary Data System) release, and remembered how excited I was to see it the first time when it came in last June. If you missed it, here it is again (with an image fresh off the PDS!) Man, I just LOVE this…
A New Look at Neptune
Ok, ok… it’s not “new” (it’s from a HubbleNews article released in 2005) but since I just came across it myself, it’s new to me! So maybe it’s new to you too. 🙂 The video above was created from images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, showing distant Neptune (we’re talking four and a half…
From the LITD Archives: Saturn’s Southern Storm
Originally posted on March 3, 2009: A great spiraling whirlpool of wind-whipped clouds wraps around Saturn’s southern pole, photographed here in polarized infrared light by Cassini on July 15, 2008. Towering white clouds mark areas of rising heat from deep within the atmosphere. The winds around the vortex have been measured at over 300 mph….
30 Years, 133 Launches, 133 Seconds
In honor of the end of NASA’s shuttle program (with only two flights remaining) CNN videographers have assembled a wonderful montage of the 133 launches over the past 30 years and put them together in the video below. Check it out! (There may be a brief advertisement at the beginning…that’s embedded in the CNN video.)…
Lights in the Dark 