Hello little world. I remember when we started getting the…

Thursday, August 7th, 2014

Hello little world.

I remember when we started getting the Pioneer and Voyager images of the outer planets and their moons. That was a wild time, when bodies that until then had only been points of light turned into recognizable worlds.

One more of those coming up.

Closer…

More from Emily Lakdawalla: Twinkling worlds in motion: New Horizons’ first optical navigation images of Pluto and Charon

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Tags: emily lakdawalla, pluto, charon, new horizons, space exploration. Posted in Tumblr by jbc | Permalink | No Comments »

Go little dude!

Thursday, April 3rd, 2014

Go little dude!

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Tags: is cool, emily lakdawalla, curiosity, mars, planetary exploration. Posted in Tumblr by jbc | Permalink | No Comments »

A view no one has ever seen before: Saturn’s complete disk,…

Thursday, October 17th, 2013

A view no one has ever seen before: Saturn’s complete disk, separate from its rings. It was created by Croatian software developer and amateur astrophotographer Gordan Ugarkovic, who combined a 3×4 mosaic of raw Cassini images taken October 10, 2013.

More details from Emiky Lakdawalla’s blog at the Planetary Society: One for the history books.

The more I look at it the more cool things there are to notice: The hard-edged shadow on the rings (because the sun doesn’t subtend the half-degree of arc that it does from the Earth and Moon, leading to an ever-so-slight gradation at the edge of lunar shadows from the partially eclipsed solar disk). The hexagonal feature at Saturn’s pole. The illumination on Saturn’s night side from the ring itself, and the way it fades near local midnight (because of the planet’s shadow on the rings) and near the equator (because from there the rings go edge-on and disappear from the perspective of an observer on Saturn’s surface).

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Tags: cassini, saturn, emily lakdawalla, space photos, gordan ugarkovic, space. Posted in Tumblr by jbc | Permalink | No Comments »