Planets to See in Your Sky Tonight
Galaxy of The Day…ARP 194
Titan glint…
A lake of an alien world glinting in the sunlight, surface liquid reveals itself on Saturn’s mysterious moon Titan, as seen by the Nasa Cassini Spacecraft from a distance of 120,000 miles in July 2009. Titan has lakes, rivers, wind, rain, valleys, and an atmosphere. It is the only body outside Earth where liquid pools on the surface. The liquid is methane or ethane and the landscape is shaped and eroded just like on Earth, only the materials used are different. The reflected sunlight is off a 150,000 square mile lake called Kraken Mare in Titan’s north.
NEWS
9th March 2010, Cassini Sees a Ghostly Rhea…
Saturn's moon Rhea as seen by Cassini on March 2nd 2010, image credit Nasa
The Cassini Spacecraft on it’s tour of the Saturn system captured this incredible raw image of Saturn’s second largest moon Rhea…Titan is Saturn’s largest moon. The view is of an icy globe fully illuminated by the Sun, as Cassini made it’s closest ever flyby at a distance of 8,900 miles from the surface. Large amounts of impact craters can be seen with very bright rims, also wispy features and bright cracks are visible.
Cassini also got close to Saturn’s Trojan satellite Helene, a 20 mile long irregular shaped body that shares it’s orbit with the moon Dione. This raw image shows Helene mostly at it’s night time side, but it’s still fairly bright because of the light reflected off Saturn.
Saturn's moon Helene from Cassini, image credit Nasa
The Nasa Cassini Spacecraft, a 22 foot long piece of hardware at around 790 million miles away, moves amongst the environment of the gas giant Saturn. The fact that we can get this thing to be in just the perfect position, pointing in the right direction, at exactly the right time to see just about anything we want is pretty incredible…and deliver mind blowing pictures to top it.
On April the 7th the Cassini Spacecraft makes a flyby of the moon Dione, a 698 mile diameter world of craters as large as 62 miles across, and cracks hundreds of kilometers long.
5/3/2010 Possible Life Enabling Molecules Found in M42 Nebula
2/3/2010 Chandrayaan Spacecraft Finds Lunar Water Ice
23/2/2010 A Tiger Stripe's Hot Spots Revealed
18/2/2010 Oldest Most Primitive Stars Found
16/2/10 The Murchison Meteorite,Full of Life's Building Blocks
14/2/2010 Mars Crater Rock Layers Show Environmental Timeline
10/2/2010 Stunning New Images of M42 From ESO
5/2/2010 Hubble Sees Pluto Change Colour
3/2/2010 A Scene of Star Birth From The VLT
27/1/2010 Furthest Stellar Mass Black Hole Found
26/1/2010 Amazing Views of Solar Eclipse From Space
26/1/2010 Nasa's Mars Rover Spirit is Stuck Fast
20/1/2010 The Pawprint of a Celestial Cat
14/1/2010 Stunning Image of Martian Crater Dunes
12/1/2010 New Behaviour at Enceladus South Pole