Here’s a fantastic look at an inner wall of Santa Maria crater on Mars, the latest stop for the rover Opportunity on its travels across the Meridiani plain. Colorized by Stuart Atkinson for his Opportunity-dedicated blog The Road to Endeavour, this is a section of a larger panoramic image showing the crater’s rim and jumbled…
Tag: science
A Saturn-Sized Storm
Earlier this week the Cassini spacecraft captured this image of an eddying storm in Saturn’s northern hemisphere. Nearly as large as the Earth, the bright clouds have been visible to amateur astronomers for several weeks and on December 27 Cassini was able to get a nice view of its own from orbit! Fantastic. See more…
Blowing off Steam
Remind me again why I love Cassini? Oh yeah, because of images like this. 🙂
Backlit Dione
Here’s a beautiful new image just in from Cassini: the silhouette of 700-mile-wide Dione seen against the sunlit limb of Saturn, its rings seen edge-on just above the moon. Some of Dione’s heavily-cratered terrain can be discerned along its southeastern edge. I particularly like the light halo effects along the edges of the moon and…
On the Edge of Santa Maria
Opportunity has finally made it to the edge of her latest observation target: the crater named “Santa Maria”!
Ditches, Devils and Dunes
There’s a lot going on in this image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera…swirling dust devil tracks paint dark streaks over the sand dunes within Russell Crater (click here for a larger view of the region) while long “peculiar” ditches run snakelike down the crater’s sloped walls. Click the image above for a…
Sunny Face
The most recent (7:15 pm CST 12-10-2010) AIA image of the Sun by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Looks like a face. 🙂 That is all. Image courtesy SDO (NASA) and the AIA consortium. (Oh, and congrats to the SDO team for their image being chosen as one of LIFE’s pictures of the year! w00tw00t!)
Rocky Shadows
Piles of boulders cast long shadows in the floor of the 18.6-mile (30 km) wide Necho crater on our moon. This dramatically-lit image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) shows the final result of a large impact on the lunar surface, and gives a nice example of some of the rugged terrain that can…
From the LITD Archives: You Are Here
Here’s an image that always blows my mind: it’s our planet as seen by the exploration rover Spirit on March 8, 2004, 63 Martian days into its mission. It’s the first image of Earth taken from the surface of another planet. The official description says: The image is a mosaic of images taken by the…
A Giant Among Moons
Our solar system’s largest moon, Ganymede. © Ted Stryk. With so much focus these days on Saturn’s many varied moons, I thought I’d post a beautiful image of Jupiter’s lesser-seen – but anything but lesser-sized – moon, Ganymede. The largest of Jupiter’s 63 named moons – as well as the largest moon in our…
Enceladus and the Rings
Here’s a surreal image of ice-covered Enceladus with Saturn’s rings in the background, as seen by Cassini on November 30, 2010 during its latest flyby. Amazing! The spacecraft was about 28,500 miles (45,827 km) away from Enceladus when this image was taken. I adjusted the levels a bit to bring out some detail in the…
Spray It, Don’t Say It
Cassini’s done it again…images of Enceladus’ south-pole jets in all their icy glory are in from yesterday’s flyby! The one shown here, a raw image that I’ve rotated 180º (so south is “down”) shows the moon lit partly by sunlight (the sliver of white crescent along the left) and partly by “Saturnshine” (reflected sunlight off…
Lights in the Dark 