While waiting for images from Cassini’s flyby of Rhea I saw this raw image, showing the stark crescent of Enceladus above the bands of Saturn’s rings, seen edge-on. A beautiful composition that deserved sharing. Where’s the moon’s geysers, you say? Don’t worry. They’re there. They just need the right lighting. Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute UPDATE: And…
Tag: solar system
Deep Impacts
This just in, a late straggler from Cassini’s recent flyby of Mimas. It shows the northern region of the “other side” of Mimas opposite the moon’s signature Herschel crater. The sheer walls of some of the craters near the top left are 2-3 miles high – or deep, depending on how you look at it…
Shadow Caster
It’s been a while since I posted any moon shadow images but they’re always cool to look at, since they add another dimension to a scene that can sometimes be hard to put into context. This image, taken by Cassini on January 10 and released today, shows the 12-mile-wide shepherd moon Pan cruising along within the…
Seeing Spots
A gorgeous photo of our Sun by Alan Friedman, taken from his location in Buffalo, NY and uploaded to his site on February 7, shows a huge string of sunspots and an energetic region of prominences, as well as the granules and spicules that create the Sun’s surface texture. Sunspot 1045, the string seen here,…
Focus on Phobos
The European Space Agency’s Mars Express has begun a series of flybys of Mars’ largest – albeit still very small – moon, Phobos. Begun on February 16 (2010) Mars Express will perform closer and closer approaches until, on March 3, it will pass by at an altitude of only 31 miles, giving us the most…
The Trailing Trojan
In a bit of more flyby goodness here’s a photo of Calypso, taken in ultraviolet light, showing nice shading on its surface and some interesting streak patterns that seem to follow the contours of the potato-shaped moon. This image was taken on Saturday, February 13, at a distance of about 14,000 miles. 19-mile-long Calypso is…
That’s No Moon…
…it’s a space sta– oh nevermind. It is a moon. 😉 Photos are in from Cassini’s flyby of Mimas on Saturday and they don’t disappoint! The 250-mile wide inner moon of Saturn performed very well in front of Cassini’s cameras, displaying its heavily-cratered surface and showing off its trademark Herschel crater; at 88 miles wide…
Voyager’s Valentine
On February 14, 1990, after nearly 13 years of traveling the outer solar system the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed the orbit of Pluto and turned its camera around to take a series of photos of the planets. The image above shows those photos, isolated from the original series and labeled left to right, top to…
A WISE Discovery
It’s small and faint and blurry but it’s definitely there… the first comet identified by WISE, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. At the center of the image is a fuzzy red dot. This dot is a 1.2-mile-wide ball of water ice and rock dubbed P/2010 B2 (WISE) – or just Comet WISE for short –…
Signs of a Hidden Sea
Cassini mission scientists have more support for the existence of an underground ocean on Enceladus, in the form of negatively-charged ions present in the moon’s southern ice geysers. In a report released February 8, 2009, the Cassini Science League announced that researchers have identified these ions using the spacecraft’s plasma spectrometer data from recent flybys…
Shear Delight
Monstrous eddies in Saturn’s upper atmosphere are clearly visible in this near-infrared image from Cassini, taken in November 2009 and released on NASA’s planetary Photojournal on February 4. Winds on Saturn are some of the fastest in the solar system, blowing around the planet in opposing bands at speeds of several hundreds of miles per…
A Patchwork Pluto
The New Horizons spacecraft may still be several years away from its flyby of the outermost ex-planet, but the Hubble Space Telescope is meanwhile grabbing glimpses of the frozen world at the edge of our solar system. The video above is composed of hundreds of individual images of Pluto, assembled over the course of four…
Lights in the Dark 