Prometheus’ shadow slices through the strands of Saturn’s F ring in this low-angle view from the Cassini orbiter. The sunlit shepherd moon is a bit overexposed in this image, in order to capture the bands of the rings. This view is looking outwards across the edge of the B ring (at lower left), the darker…
Tag: solar system
Shadow Play
A series of images from Cassini shows the 110-mile-wide Janus passing through shadows cast by Saturn’s rings. Janus shares its orbit within the ring system with sister moon Epimetheus. Both are small, rocky worlds…irregularly-shaped clusters of rubble pockmarked by ancient craters and displaying lots of scrapes and gouges, evidence of glancing blows by larger bodies.
A Dusty Sunset
The Spirit rover, still mired in the soft sand, recently took a series of photos showing the sun setting into a dusty Martian sky. I combined the raw images here to create a short animation. Yes, Spirit is still stuck near Home Plate. Its power levels are good but the rover team has not tried…
Worlds Great and Small
A wonderful raw image from the Cassini spacecraft showing a crescent-lit Saturn and one of its 61 known moons. Honestly I’m not sure which moon this is. Could be Tethys, could be Titan, it’s hard to make out in this wide-angle view. Also in crescent, its night side is dimly lit by reflected “Saturnshine”. Cassini…
All About Abedin
This image from the MESSENGER spacecraft shows the crater Abedin, recently named after Bangladeshi painter Zainul Abedin. The 68-mile-wide crater exhibits a central peak structure and is surrounded by lines of smaller craters, most likely caused by the ejected debris from the initial impact. Most of the features on Mercury have been named after the…
Dark Rings
The shadow of Saturn’s rings is reduced to a thin sliver running across the face of the planet in the upper part of this image taken on August 12, one day after its spring equinox. The rings appear dark in this image, since the sunlight is striking them edge-on and Cassini’s cameras are set so…
The Ghost and the Darkness
A spectral figure casts a long shadow as it travels along the path of Saturn’s F ring on August 7, 2009 in this image from the Cassini orbiter. Not a ghost per se but rather a clump of ring material, pulled upwards from the rest of the ring plane by what is perhaps a small…
A Giant Among Moons
The largest of Jupiter’s 63 known moons and the largest moon in our solar system, Ganymede has twice the mass of our own moon and is even larger than the planet Mercury. Its surface is marked by dark regions which are  full of craters and lighter areas lined with ridges. This image was taken by…
Pluto Reinstated?
Will Pluto be reissued its former status as a full-fledged planet? While it won’t necessarily be a topic of debate at next week’s meeting of the International Astronomical Union – the group in charge of, amongst other things, the official naming of all things extraterrestrial and thus the group responsible for voting Pluto off the…
Blast Zone
The Hubble Space Telescope trained its newly-installed Wide Field Camera 3 on Jupiter, capturing a photo of the recent impact scar made on July 19. This image is the first taken by the new camera installed in May, and while it’s still uncalibrated, details can be seen of the dark debris plume that has spread…
The Ring
No, it’s not the final frame of a haunted videotape…it’s a backlit Titan, silhouetted against the sun, photographed by Cassini from over 850,000 miles away. Titan’s upper-level atmospheric haze is illuminated in this image, surrounding the moon high above the cloudtops. The haze is a mixture of complex hydrocarbons created by the breakdown of methane…
Taking a Hit
Between the hours of 6am and noon EDT on Monday, July 20, something smashed into Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. And here’s the scar to prove it. First noticed as a dark blotch by amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley, monitoring the giant planet via telescope from Australia, the impact was soon confirmed via…
Lights in the Dark 