‘Solar System’ Archives
Sailing on the lakes of Titan
Imagine sailing on a lake on the moon of Titan in a nuclear powered sailing craft with Saturn rising high in the sky above you. There is wind and rain, but its a chilly -180 Celsius where Ethane and Methane flow instead of liquid water in world which has been described as an eerie version of Earth. (more...)
Rare picture of Earth as seen from Mars
This is a truely imspiring image of Earth as seen by a Nasa spacecrafts currently orbiting Mars. This photo is a mix of visual and InfraRed images and apparently took quite a bit of effort to produce. Currently Nasa have a mission to take high resolution images of Mars using the HiRISE instrument (High Resolution Imaging Science [...]
No visible 10km Plume from LCROSS impact
According to NASA TV there was no significant visible plume from the impact of the spacecraft. There is good spectographic data and it does show Sodium a cause for some excitement as it wasn't expected. Regarding the spectorgraphic data, they are being cautiously optimistic despite the lack of a visible plume, but they point blank refused [...]
LCROSS Impacts!
Moments ago LCROSS impacted into the moon. I watched it live on NASA live streaming...Will take a while to get any details...will keep you posted
Image of the LCROSS Lunar Impact site!
In less than 24 hours the LCROSS will smash into the Cabeus crater 100km from the Lunar south pole. I've already blogged that the idea is to smash into the Lunar surface with one part of the spacecraft, and have the second part fly through the resultant 10km cloud of debris and gather data to see what it found below the surface of the Moon... [...]
Spitzer’s warm images
The Spitzer spacecraft was designed to take infrared pictures of the cosmos. From its launch in Aug 2003 until May 2009 it has manged to take some amazing pictures of the universe. To accompish this it use a coolant which kept the Telescope IR instruments at a chilly 30 degree Kelvin so that its own instruments would not interfere with the [...]
Massive Mosaic of Mercury | Universe Today
Massive Mosaic of Mercury | Universe Today Posted using ShareThis
Jupiter Photo from Dublin Oct 4th 2009
Once again the sky was not great, but every now and then I could see the Moon and Jupiter quite clearly. So I managed to take a picture (a bit overexposed perhaps) and I caught the 4 Galilean satellites - Io Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. So then I started to wonder, how to tell them apart. Sky and Telescope have a super Java tool called Jupiter's [...]
Harvest Moon taken from the Irish Nightsky
There might be some clouds around, but there was just enough time for me to take this picture of the Harvest Moon. Taken in Dublin from my back garden using Nikon D50 Camera with a 300mm Lens, 200ISO, 1,000 shutter speed. Hope you like it!
Opportunity Finds Another Big Meteorite | Universe Today
Opportunity Finds Another Big Meteorite | Universe Today Posted using ShareThis
Viewing the sky this weekend
Want to see all the planets in 24hours? Here is a guide to viewing them over this weekend...check out the weekend sky forcast by Tammy Plotner
Messeneger Goes into “safe mode”
Despite all the hype, the Messenger spacecraft went into safe mode on it's flyby of Mercury yesterday. So all of the images and information it intended to send were never fully realized. It was still seen as a successful mission as its primary objective was to get the gravity assist it required to ensure a 2011 orbit insertion. It may be less than [...]