Category Archives: Pictures

Space pictures

Pictures

Tracing Curiosity’s recent trip on Mars

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Curiosity rover takes a trip exploring the Pahrump Hills outcrop
Curiosity rover takes a trip exploring the Pahrump Hills outcrop

The Mars Curiosity rover has been pretty busy the last few years, checking out all kinds of sights and samples on Mars. This map shows the Pahrump Hills area that it was exploring during the September – October months of this year. Starting off at Confidence Hills, it drilled some samples for analysis and moved along the outcrop taking breaks (shown as red dots) along the way. The white dots represent areas where Curiosity stopped to take additional pictures and data of the Pahrump Hills outcrop. The mission ended in an area dubbed White Rock.

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Pictures

Scary ghost face on Mercury

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Some see a scary ghost face where other see mountains and craters from Mercury
Some see a scary ghost face where other see mountains and craters from Mercury

We often hear about people seeing shapes in unrelated objects and this is another example of this psychological phenomena (called pareidolia) from the planet Mercury. Here you can see the mountains, the craters and the shadows on this part of Mercury but if you let your imagination loose (a bit) you can also see what looks like a ghost face near the lower right portion of the picture. This scary picture was provided thanks to NASA’s narrow angle camera aboard its MESSENGER space probe.

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Pictures

Shadowy Saturn and Titan in crescent phase

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Saturn and Titan are in shadows, showing a crescent phase
Saturn and Titan are in shadows, showing a crescent phase

These images of Saturn and Titan probably provided astronomers and scientists with a lot of valuable information but regardless, they are also very nice to look at (for everyone).  This crescent phase of Saturn and its moon Titan was captured by the Cassini orbiter’s on board camera systems, taken while Cassini was looking towards the sunlit side of Saturn’s rings from just above the ring plane. The spacecraft was approximately 1.7 million kilometers from Saturn when it took this violet light image in 2013.

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Cosmic clouds of a neutron star

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Chandra and WISE explore the neutron star PSR B1509-58
Chandra and WISE explore the neutron star PSR B1509-58

About 17,000 light years from Earth lies the system with a very bland name of PSR B1509-58. It consists of a spinning neutron star nebula surrounded by a cloud of energetic particles. This composite image includes X-ray emissions captured by the Chandra X-ray Observatory (seen as yellow-gold coloured portions) and data from the infrared spectrum captured by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (seen in red, green and blue). Many people report seeing a shape that looks like a face within the infrared data from this neutron star system.

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Pictures

Ring of fire

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Spitzer space telescope captures the ring of stellar fire in galaxy NGC 1291
Spitzer space telescope captures the ring of stellar fire in galaxy NGC 1291

What do new young stars look like as they heat up the surrounding space dust? The Spitzer Space Telescope looked out to the galaxy NGC 1291 and captured an infrared image of quite the firestorm created by this awe inspiring phenomenon. The distinctive outer red ring in this 12 billion year old galaxy from the Eridanus constellation, consists of new stars and is the “Ring of Fire“. The older stars lie in the central blue coloured “S” area of the galaxy and produce shorter-wavelength infrared light.

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