Here’s an enchanting video by the European Southern Observatory highlighting the discoveries of their Very Large Telescope (VLT) array, high in the mountains of the Atacama Desert in Chile. The Atacama is the driest place on Earth, far from the light pollution of major cities, and thus provides the clearest, darkest skies allowing these massive…
Tag: science
Fo Sizzle
A beautiful photo by Alan Friedman showing a solar prominence twisting high – as in, tens of thousands of miles high – above the surface of the Sun. This image was taken on June 2, 2010 through Friedman’s hydrogen alpha telescope. This allows us to see the complex texture of the Sun’s surface, called the…
Crater in Chaos
Here’s an intriguing image of a dune-filled crater on the edge of a plateau on Mars, taken by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on April 27, 2010. The heavily-eroded face of the plateau is the result of millennia of wind erosion, which most likely provided the source of the material which has…
Jupiter Impact Video
Hm hm hm…..*poof*…………..is that all you got? 🙂 Here’s a video of yesterday’s impact on Jupiter by whatever object was unfortunate enough to have a run-in with the gigantic planet. This was made by Anthony Wesley, the Australian astronomer who spotted the event as it happened through his custom telescope setup. Keep in mind that…
Jupiter Takes a Hit…Again!
Even as the Hubble team released the image above detailing the scars from the July 2009 asteroid impact on Jupiter, another object was on a collision course with our solar system’s giant planet…and Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley was at his station (yet again!) and captured an image of the impact! Read all about it…
Hyperion
Here’s a wonderful color mosaic of Saturn’s moon Hyperion, assembled by Gordan Ugarkovic from four Cassini narrow-angle camera images. The moon’s heavily cratered sponge-like surface can be seen in vivid detail due to the high phase angle of sunlight, making its rough texture even more pronounced. At 255 x 163 x 137 miles in diameter,…
Out of the Blue
Japan’s Akatsuki (PLANET-C) spacecraft, launched on May 20, captured this image of home as it sped away on its six-month journey to Venus. Using its ultraviolet camera Akatsuki (“Dawn” in Japanese) saw the crescent Earth as a bright electric blue from a distance of over 155,000 miles away, on May 21, 2010. Akatsuki (as well…
Back That Thing Up
For those of you who haven’t seen this yet, it’s a very neat animation made from three days’ worth of images from the Opportunity rover as it climbed away from the rim of Victoria crater in late August 2008. The “shaky cam” look gives it a very you-are-there documentary feeling, especially since the height of…
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…
Titanesque
Here’s an image of Titan as seen by Cassini on May 23, 2010. I combined data from the red, green and blue color filters as well as overlaying some surface detail of the moon’s dark dune fields captured with the spacecraft’s cloud-piercing near-infrared camera. Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute/J. Major
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 Clouded Giant
Image data are now coming in from today’s flyby of Titan, the image above is a rotated color-composite made from three raw images taken with Cassini’s red, green and blue visible light color filters. (I think I got the north-south alignment right…) Titan’s high-level hydrocarbon haze is visible, a pale blue and violet band encircling…
Lights in the Dark 