The narrow angle camera on-board the Cassini orbiter took this picture of Saturn’s moon Enceldaus as it was looking across the moon’s south pole. The geyser basin includes three fractures that have been identified (and named) by various scientists and which provide us with this “light show” of jets escaping from the geysers.
The panoramic camera on NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover took this picture of the 20 feet wide Lunokhod 2 crater. The Opportunity Rover approaches this area which is in the western rim of Endeavour Crater. Along with the now familiar reddish-brown, desert like Martian landscape, we can also see the rover’s rear solar arrays and a calibration target used to tweak its panoramic camera. This picture was taken on April 24, 2014 which was Opportunity’s 3,644th Martian day of exploration. This exploratory drive and every one since then, see Opportunity make new records for the longest travel on wheels on a celestial word, other than Earth. It surpassed the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 2 rover’s exploits on our Moon.
It looked like a spotlight shining down on us from the night sky. Over this past weekend, the moon was closest to the Earth and visibly brighter and larger when viewed through the naked eye. This picture was taken in the city of Toronto and even though there are many better pictures of the supermoon from this past weekend, it does show the full moon. A telephoto lens was definitely called for!
Comet Catalina (C/2013 UQ4) was originally being tracked as an asteroid but later turned out to be a comet. This latest discovery was made earlier this year by Artyom Novichonok (who also helped discover Comet ISON) and Taras Prystavski using a remote telescope in Siding Spring, Australia. Comet Catalina was closest to the Sun (at its perihelion) on July 6, 2014 and was extremely active shortly thereafter. This image was taken by NASA’s asteroid hunting NEOWISE space survey program.
The Cassini Orbiter provides us with a view that is impossible to get from Earth. From a distance of approximately 2 million km, it is able to capture Saturn in this state where only a thin sliver of the planet is lit by the Sun, while the rest is essentially dark for its “night” (except for some faint illumination where its rings are reflecting some light back onto the planet). The lit portion looks a lot like the crescent shape that we regularly see of our Moon.
