The Cassini orbiter took this distant (from 1.3 million kilometers) image of Saturn’s satellite, Dione. The picture was taken with Cassini’s narrow-angle camera as the NASA-ISA craft was perfectly aligned to have the Sun at its back. Dione’s surface is covered in craters, with very rough and scarred terrain due to Dione’s active and often violent past.
This subtle and smoothed out infrared image of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan was taken by Cassini spacecraft’s narrow-angle camera and shows us a band around the Titan’s north pole. The mind boggling aspect of this image is that it was taken while Cassini was approximately 1.5 million miles (2.4 million kilometers) from Titan, using a spectral filter which preferentially allows through wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 889 nanometers.
NASA’s Spitzer Space telescope took this image of asteroid 2011 MD in February 2014. This infrared picture was taken at a wavelength of 4.5 microns over a very long time period (20 hours), which was needed to pick up the faint signature of the small asteroid (near the center of this image). Scientists have narrowed down the size of the space rock to roughly a mere 20 feet (6 meters).
The ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory houses the largest infrared telescope placed into space in order to study the lives and evolution of stars and galaxies. Its on-board instruments took this stunning image of a large cloud of cosmic dust and gases which are 9,100 light years from Earth, referred to as NGC 7538, and shows a giant ring like structure that is situated at the center-top of this picture. Astronomers and scientists are not certain as to what this cosmic ring may be but it could help in their study of how stars come into existence.
The Idunn Mons volcano was photographed by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Venus Express spacecraft mission. This volcanic peak is about 200 km across and sits at 46 degrees south latitude, 214.5 degrees east longitude in the Imdr Regio area of Venus. The reddish-orange portion near the center of the image represents the warmest area which is centered on the summit and stands about 2.5 kilometers (1.6 miles) above the plains.
