I’ve been playing around with making color versions of images from the Cassini raw image downloads, now that I know what to look for it’s relatively easy to put together a somewhat “natural color” version of the sights around the Saturn system. (The image above was a little trickier, I had to take…
Tag: space
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…
Frozen Cliffs
One of the newest raw images from Cassini’s latest flyby shows the icy terrain of Saturn’s moon Dione, with steep hills, ridges and the bright face of one of the many deep canyons that meander across its surface. Known as “wispy lines”, these canyon walls expose bright water ice (that makes up about a quarter…
Rings of Light
Viewed from its night side sunlight illuminates Saturn’s atmosphere and rings, creating brilliant arcs of light in this image from Cassini, taken on February 13. Saturn’s shadow darkens the near side of the rings while their distant Sun-facing portion casts its own shadow into the atmosphere, in the bottom half of the image. The Cassini…
This Week in Space
The Discovery crew outlines the upcoming STS-131 mission (scheduled to launch at 6:21am EST tomorrow), new ISS team members blast off to work from Kazakhstan, Toyota teams up with NASA to investigate some out-of-this-world causes to their products’ malfunctions, Spirit settles down for a long [Martian] winter’s nap, Â Saturn’s moon Mimas shows off its retro…
Flying Pan
Making a complete orbit in just under 14 hours, the 17-mile-wide shepherd moon Pan cruises around Saturn within the Encke gap in the A ring. In the image above, taken by Cassini on January 8, we can see Pan casting a sliver of a shadow onto the outer edge of the gap as it causes…
Now That’s a Moon!
Just released today, this portrait of Saturn’s moon Mimas showcases its striking similarity to the Death Star (pre-proton torpedoes of course). The Cassini imaging team has been hard at work processing the images from last month’s flyby and the results sure don’t disappoint! On February 13 Cassini passed Mimas at a distance of 5,900 miles…
A Grand View
Cutting over a mile into the surrounding landscape, the Grand Canyon in Arizona is one of the most amazing places I have ever visited…and it’s no less beautiful from 200 nautical miles up! This photo was taken today by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi aboard the International Space Station and immediately sent to his TwitPic page…
Rhea and the Rings
This is one of those sublime photos from Cassini that just make me smile. Taken on March 24, this raw image shows Rhea, Saturn’s second-largest moon, suspended in orbit in front of the twilight side of Saturn, its rings reduced to a thin ribbon of bands at this viewing angle. The width of the rings…
You say potato, I say Prometheus.
Here’s a nicely processed-and-polished photo of Saturn’s moon Prometheus, fresh from the Cassini imaging center at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, CO. Taken during the spacecraft’s flyby of the F-ring’s shepherd moon earlier this year, this image shows Prometheus’ potato-like shape and heavily cratered surface on its trailing side, dimly illuminated by reflected light…
This Week in Space
The space shuttle Discovery prepares for launch and new discoveries from NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer…kamikaze comets, another exoplanet spotted, a closer look at the moons Rhea, Pallene and Phobos, lost spacecraft, an interview with retired astronaut Bernard Harris and lots more in this edition of This Week in Space with Miles O’Brien. Enjoy! Provided…
Inside the Hurricane
The largest storm in the solar system, Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot, is a monstrous 15,000-mile-wide hurricane that’s been swirling in the giant planet’s mid-lower latitudes for at least 300 years. It’s believed that the storm’s colors are caused by the different elements within Jupiter’s upper atmosphere… ammonia, methane, water, hydrocarbons and other chemicals that create a…
Lights in the Dark 