Here’s a beautiful color portrait of Saturn taken by Cassini during the planet’s 2009 spring equinox last August. Approximately every fifteen years Saturn is angled so that the light from the sun strikes it straight-on, causing the shadows cast by the rings to appear as a pencil-thin line along its equator. The Cassini spacecraft happened…
Tag: planet
Color Me Saturn
A somewhat truish colorized image of Saturn’s southern hemisphere, taken by Cassini on June 26, 2010 from a distance of 1,354,284 miles (that’s over five times the distance from Earth to the moon!) I substituted Cassini’s infrared and ultraviolet raw image channels for red and blue, respectively, and adjusted the combined results (with a native…
A Picture of Home
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter turned its cameras toward home from a distance of over 231,000 miles away on June 12, 2010. Looking back at Earth in this way helps to calibrate its Wide Angle Camera, and while doing so two images were taken with its Narrow Angle Camera and combined to create this beautiful black-and-white…
Picasso, Pits (and other things that start with “P”)
The recently-named Picasso crater on Mercury, shown in the center of this image, is 83 miles wide and features an interestingly-shaped depression in its center that’s thought to have been caused by the collapse of a magma chamber beneath the surface. Features like this are important to planetary scientists because they indicate the existence of…
Avalanche!
It’s always exciting to catch geologic surface events in action on Mars, reminding us that the red planet isn’t just a museum piece but a very active place! The image above is from the HiRISE camera on the Reconnaissance Orbiter showing dust clouds billowing up nearly 200 feet at the base of an ice cliff…
Rings of Light
Viewed from its night side sunlight illuminates Saturn’s atmosphere and rings, creating brilliant arcs of light in this image from Cassini, taken on February 13. Saturn’s shadow darkens the near side of the rings while their distant Sun-facing portion casts its own shadow into the atmosphere, in the bottom half of the image. The Cassini…
Darken the Lights
This Saturday, from 8:30 to 9:30pm your local time, join millions of people around the world in celebration of the 4th annual Earth Hour by turning off the lights in your home or office. It’s a message of support for our planet! It’s about individual empowerment and generating an interest and a global voice on…
Groovy Rock
Another image from Opportunity showing some of the heavily-textured rocks ringing Concepción crater in fascinating detail, color-calibrated by Stuart Atkinson for an approximation of Martian natural lighting. You can clearly see here the layered structure of the rocks, their angular shapes, the interesting “crust” that coats their sides as well as the small stone “berries”…
Work Well Done
A poignant entry on xkcd.com, a webcomic by Randall Munroe. This is based on the recent news that the rover named Spirit will now officially be a “stationary science platform”. After repeated attempts to dislodge it from its current location, wheels hopelessly embedded in soft sand in a locale called “Troy”, the decision was made…
Hello, Neighbor
On Friday, January 29, Mars was in opposition and appeared very bright in the eastern sky, near the Moon. The photograph above was shot and color-calibrated by photographer Alan Friedman from his location in Buffalo, New York. The bright north polar ice cap is clearly visible, as are some darker surface features and wispy clouds….
Southern Dunes
Here’s an exceptionally beautiful image taken by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showing rippling dunes within a crater on Mars’ southern hemisphere. The way the dunes are lit reminds me of a Salvador Dali painting, the central area reminiscent of the lower part of a human face. The brightest areas are…
Good Morning Antarctica
Last night the Rosetta spacecraft took this stunning image of Earth, showing the rosy crescent of the southern pole lit by the summer sun. (It’s nearing the height of summer in Antarctica, when the sun never fully sets for several months.) Click for a larger view. Absolutely beautiful. I rotated the image so that south…
Lights in the Dark 