Looking quite regal on Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 39A, Discovery gets lit up by powerful xenon lamps in this animation made from live video feed images taken on the night before her final launch. As of this writing the shuttle liftoff is on schedule for 4:50pm EST on Thursday, February 24. The images above were…
Tag: space
Dione’s Wispy Cliffs
First spotted by the Voyager spacecraft thirty years ago, it wasn’t until Cassini that the linear features criscrossing Saturn’s moon Dione known as “wispy lines” were confirmed to be the icy faces of high cliff walls rising hundreds of feet from the moon’s frozen surface. Possibly caused by tectonic activity Dione’s cliff walls shine brightly…
Kepler’s Discovery: New Worlds for the Finding
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Today NASA held a press conference at 1pm EST to present the discovery of over 1,200 exoplanet candidates by the Kepler telescope, an orbiting space observatory that’s been watching a section of the sky near the constellation Cygnus for the past year and a half. (The spacecraft launched…
WordPress Posting Challenge
Ok, it’s not really a challenge for me because I post an awful lot of things here on Lights in the Dark, but I think it’s great that WordPress is putting forth the effort to get more of their bloggers….well, blogging, with their Post Every Day Challenge. It’s an attempt to get people writing, regardless…
A Close Pass
Here’s a close-up look at the extensively-cratered surface of Rhea, Saturn’s second-largest moon, captured by Cassini as it performed its closest flyby yet on the morning of  January 11, 2010. Passing a mere 43 miles (69 km) over the surface, Cassini got a great look at some of the deep craters that literally cover the…
Radar Love
NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar, located in California’s Mojave Desert, recently made some detailed observations of asteroid 2010 JL33 on December 11 and 12, 2010 as it tumbled through space at a distance of 5.3 million miles – 22 times further away than the Moon! The radar images have also been assembled into a…
Saturn’s Skyline
A raw image from Cassini taken on January 9, 2011, this minimally-composed image is actually quite fascinating (IMO): it’s a look at the upper levels of Saturn’s atmosphere in methane wavelength! Yes, Saturn is a gas giant and most of its volume is made up of hydrogen and helium, but there are layers of its…
At Crater’s Edge
Here’s a fantastic look at an inner wall of Santa Maria crater on Mars, the latest stop for the rover Opportunity on its travels across the Meridiani plain. Colorized by Stuart Atkinson for his Opportunity-dedicated blog The Road to Endeavour, this is a section of a larger panoramic image showing the crater’s rim and jumbled…
Blowing off Steam
Remind me again why I love Cassini? Oh yeah, because of images like this. 🙂
When the Moon hits your eye…
Last night’s beautiful lunar eclipse – the first one occurring on the winter solstice in 426 years! – had the Moon at one point tinted a coppery-red and floating in the night sky amongst the stars…it almost felt like you could reach up and pluck it from the sky! It was wonderfully surreal. Without a…
Like Ships in the Night – Akatsuki Sails Right Past Venus
So close, but yet so far. In a poignant farewell, Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft returned this image of Venus as it sped off into space, its attempt at establishing orbit having failed on Wednesday, December 8. The $300 million scientific observatory was created to study the atmosphere of our neighboring planet, as well as use its…
A Giant Among Moons
Our solar system’s largest moon, Ganymede. © Ted Stryk. With so much focus these days on Saturn’s many varied moons, I thought I’d post a beautiful image of Jupiter’s lesser-seen – but anything but lesser-sized – moon, Ganymede. The largest of Jupiter’s 63 named moons – as well as the largest moon in our…
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