We’ve all seen the Moon go through its phases over the course of a month’s time (give or take a day or two) as it travels in its orbit around the Earth, and you may have even seen the cool animation from the NASA Goddard Visualization Studio showing an entire year’s worth of lunar phases….
Tag: space
Learn How to See the Big Picture With “The Orbital Perspective”
If you’re anything like me you get a lot of your information online through various news and social media sources. This is great, as it puts the most up-to-date news in front of you instantly. But sometimes it’s nice to sit down and open up a book – yes, a real live book with pages you…
Dawn Captures the Bestest Images Ever of “Hipster Planet” Ceres
This is the second animation from Dawn this year showing Ceres rotating, and at 43 pixels across the images are officially the best ever obtained! NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is now on final approach to the 590-mile-wide dwarf planet Ceres, the largest world in the main asteroid belt and the biggest object in the inner Solar System that has yet to…
Opportunity Celebrates 11 Years on Mars With a Grand Panorama
While we have been getting most of our daily images of Mars from NASA’s Curiosity rover over the past couple of years, we shouldn’t forget that there’s still another rover keeping busy on the Red Planet: Opportunity, one of the twin Mars Exploration Rovers (MER-B), still exploring after 11 years! To commemorate Opportunity’s upcoming landing…
Been Waiting for Hi-Res OSIRIS Images of Rosetta’s Comet? Here They Are!
Many of the images we have been seeing of Rosetta’s comet – 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, or 67P for short – have been captured with the spacecraft’s NavCam instrument. And while they have been amazingly beautiful in their own right, NavCam isn’t Rosetta’s best camera; that distinction goes to OSIRIS, the Optical, Spectroscopic, and Infrared Remote Imaging System…
Watch a Beautiful Timelapse Captured from Earth Orbit
ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst spent nearly six months living and working in orbit aboard the ISS during Expedition 41 in 2014, and during that time he captured some amazing photos of Earth from the windows of the Station. Watch above as aurorae dance and shimmer, stars and satellites wheel overhead, and city lights shine below…
Hello, Ceres! Dawn Returns Images of Dwarf Planet Spinning
Wow, check this out! The 590-mile-wide dwarf planet Ceres is seen rotating in this GIF animation made from the latest images from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, taken over the course of an hour on January 13, 2015. Dawn was 238,000 miles (383,000 km) from Ceres when the images were taken, and although only 27 pixels across…
Curiosity’s First “Selfie” of 2015
Here’s a “selfie” of NASA’s Curiosity rover, made from about 20 images acquired by its MAHLI instrument on mission sol 868 (January 14, 2015). I used Photoshop to stitch the raw images together and then enhanced the contrast and detail with a bit of HDR effect. (There’s one spot behind the rover’s RTG where an…
Half-kilometer Asteroid to Pass Closely By on January 26
Just under two weeks from now, on Monday, Jan. 26, the 1/3-mile (0.5-km) -wide potentially hazardous asteroid 357439 (2004 BL86) will pass by Earth at 3.1 lunar distances, or 739,680 miles (1,190,400 km). While this may sound like a long way off, in the grand scheme of things it’s still a close pass… especially for…
Eppur Si Muove: Galileo’s Big Night
Note: This is an edited repost of an article from 2014. 405 years ago tonight, January 7, 1610, the Pisan astronomer Galileo Galilei looked up at a bright Jupiter at opposition through his handmade telescope and saw three little “stars” next to it, which piqued his natural scientific curiosity. He soon realized that these little…
Hubble’s Stunning Star-Filled View of the Andromeda Galaxy
It’s Hubble’s 25th anniversary in space this year but it seems like we’re the ones getting all the presents! Yesterday NASA released two new high-def versions of the famous “Pillars of Creation” image, and now today there’s this: Hubble’s most detailed image ever of the Andromeda Galaxy! Containing over 100 million stars it’s not just the…
Hubble Gives Us Our Best View Yet Of The “Pillars of Creation”
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its launch this year and to commemorate the milestone it’s recently turned its gaze (during the course of about 15 orbits) back onto one of the most iconic targets of its career: the “Pillars of Creation,” five-light-year-high columns of cold gas in the process of being sculpted…
Lights in the Dark 