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…
Tag: science
A Varying Venusian Vortex
Our neighboring planet Venus really is a world of extremes; searing surface temperatures, crushing air pressure, sulfuric acid clouds…Venus pretty much pushes the envelope on every aspect of rocky-planet existence. And now here’s one more thing that made scientists do a double-take: a shape-shifting vortex swirling around Venus’ south pole! The presence of a cyclonic…
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…
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. đŸ™‚ The video above was created from images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, showing distant Neptune (we’re talking four and a half…
Afternoon Delight
I spotted this on the SDO site late this afternoon…it shows an eruption of plasma from the Sun’s photosphere that stretches out many tens of thousands of miles…the Earth could easily fit many times over beneath the looping structure! This image is from about 5pm EDT (21:59 UT), and shows the eastern limb of the Sun,…
Icy Spiders
Near Mars’ polar regions, spidery cracks and crevasses in the surface hold the last remnants of the winter season’s carbon dioxide frost – a.k.a. “dry ice” – which will eventually evaporate into the Martian atmosphere as CO2 gas. This process is seen on Earth only in specialized manmade situations such as when used as…
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,…
There Goes The Sun
The Sun was briefly slashed in half diagonally when Earth’s atmosphere hid it from the view of NASA’s SDO spacecraft on April 1, 2011. (No foolin’!) SDO is currently in an orbit that puts the Earth between it and the Sun momentarily each day. When this happens, SDO’s view is blocked completely for several minutes…
The Colors of Mercury
Another new wide-angle image from MESSENGER in orbit, this is a color image of Mercury made from data taken in red, green and blue visible light wavelengths. Variations in surface textures and colorations can be seen, as well as long bright streaks running horizontally  – these are the ejecta rays extending from Hokusai Crater, off-frame…
First Image from Mercury Orbit!
It’s been over 11 days since MESSENGER established orbit around the planet Mercury, and we now have THE first image from orbit! The image above was obtained this morning, March 29 at 5:20am EDT as MESSENGER was above Mercury’s south pole – a portion of which has never previously been imaged by spacecraft. Click here…
Space Cell
I don’t usually post images from outside our solar system here on LITD, but this one was too good not to share! NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory made this image of the Tycho supernova remnant, an object in our Milky Way galaxy about 13,000 light years from Earth, in the constellation Cassiopeia. In visible light it…
From the LITD Archives: But What About Venus?
Originally posted on April 7, 2009, only two months after Lights in the Dark launched: I haven’t posted anything yet about our other neighboring planet, Venus, mostly because the currently active mission exploring it, the European Space Agency’s Venus Express orbiter, hasn’t been updating much with new images since I’ve begun this site. Still, Venus…
Lights in the Dark 