Space pictures
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 composite image combines data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and its Spitzer Space Telescope shows the massive black hole in this distant galaxy, NGC 4258 and the radio jets. The blue portions of the image are from the x-ray data provided by Chandra while the red and green represent the infrared emissions from hydrogen molecules observed by Spitzer. The x-ray and hydrogen emissions are believed to have been caused by shocks which are close to a sonic boom – except from a supersonic plane.
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.
