Emily Lakdawalla of The Planetary Society calls this “the most amazing image of Enceladus Cassini has captured yet.” While I like some of the images from November’s flyby a bit more, this is still very, very cool! It is a combination of two images (processed by unmannedspaceflight.com member Astro0) taken during the same flyby event,…
Tag: science
Peekaboo Moon
Here’s another color composite from Cassini, showing Rhea on the far side of the rings, its northern tip peeking through the Cassini Division. (I’m not 100% sure what smaller moon that is on the left, but my guess is either Janus or Epimetheus.) What I find interesting in this image is the bright streak within…
Skimming the Rings
Saturn’s second-largest moon Rhea passes across the face of the ringed planet in this image, color-combined from three raw images taken by Cassini on May 8, 2010. The rings are seen on edge here, a dark horizontal stripe running underneath the cratered 950-mile-wide moon, their wide shadows cast onto Saturn’s atmosphere below. I really love…
The Light of a Distant Sun
Since I haven’t posted in a while, I thought I’d put up this image I was playing with last week…it’s a raw image of Saturn’s moon Iapetus combined with a bit of a “glow” from an off-frame Sun and a few stars thrown into the background. Just for curiosity’s sake. 🙂 914-mile-wide Iapetus was discovered…
May the 4th be with you…
Happy Star Wars Day! Now there’s a holiday I can really get into. 🙂 To celebrate, I felt that it would be appropriate to post about the most Star-Warsy object in our solar system: Saturn’s moon Mimas! Below is a repost from March 29, Now That’s a Moon! Here we go again… This portrait of…
This Week in Space
With Miles O’Brien on vacation, David Waters hosts this episode of This Week in Space highlighting rocket plane racing, the upcoming private-sector SpaceX rocket launch, the Atlantis and Discovery shuttle missions with new antimatter telescope components to be installed aboard the ISS, NASA uses weather satellites to keep an eye on BP’s oily mess in…
Fast Eddy
A huge swirling eddy in Saturn’s northern equatorial bands is visible in this image from Cassini, taken in wavelengths of light sensitive to methane. The planet’s rings are a bright line, illuminated by the sun and casting their shadows onto Saturn’s cloudtops. This image was taken today, April 29. Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI
Two Decades of Discovery
As this weekend marks the 2oth anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s launch, here’s a video from the Hubble team highlighting just a few of the many discoveries the orbiting observatory has made since first opening its – and our – eyes to the universe. Here’s to many more years of Hubble! Read more on…
Showing Some Flare
After weeks of waiting patiently, the first images are finally here! This video shows an arching prominence erupting from the surface of the Sun on March 30, 2010, as seen by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in beautiful IMAX-quality high resolution. (By the way, AIA stands for Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, one of the three main tools…
Meanwhile, back on Mars…
Opportunity has recently moved away from its latest distraction: a pair of ancient craters in the dust dunes of the Meridiani Plains dubbed “San Antonio”. The rover didn’t stay long though…a couple of days, just enough to take a few photos of the soft-edged, sandy craters. It has since struck out south again over the…
Cassini Captures Saturn’s Lightning
This is a movie from the Cassini imaging team showing gigantic lightning flashes inside a storm cloud on Saturn! Depicting a 16-minute span of time, the movie shows lightning illuminating large, 300-km-diameter areas within the 3,000-km-long cloud. (The “zap zap” sounds were added later to represent the radio signals that were received by Cassini during…
A Wrinkled World
Combined from 3 images taken in red, green and blue filters, this color composite image of Enceladus shows the little moon’s fractured terrain, varying from a heavily cratered north polar region to the corrugated texture of its mid-latitudes to the deep twisted grooves of its famous southern “tiger stripes”, the sources of its ice geysers…
Lights in the Dark 