Archive for November 9th, 2009

Below is the best image yet taken of the Apollo 11 landing site from the LROC, and the first since LRO dropped into its 50 km (31 miles) orbit. Just look at those landing pads!

Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera team earlier released two pictures of the Apollo 11 landing site, each taken under different lighting conditions and at lower resolution than this image. This is LROC’s first picture of Apollo 11 after LRO dropped into its 50 km mapping orbit. At this altitude, very small details of Tranquility Base can be discerned. The footpads of the LM are clearly discernible. Components of the Early Apollo Science Experiments Package (EASEP) are easily seen, as well. Boulders from West Crater lying on the surface to the east stand out, and the many small craters that cover the moon are visible to the southeast.

Hurricane Ida viewed from one of the GOES satellites.

Residents of the U.S. Gulf coast thought they were getting a break this hurricane season until they heard news of Ida. Fortunately, Ida weakened substantially and was downgraded to a Tropical Storm as she prepared to make landfall. This video from the NASA/NOAA GOES satellites shows Ida’s development between November 6th and 9th 2009.

View of Tropical Storm Ida taken yesterday.

Tropical Storm Ida was poised over the Yucatan Channel between the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image of the storm on November 8, 2009. A core of thunderstorms appears near the center of storm, their “boiling” tops contrasting with the smoother deck of clouds that stretches from the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico eastward to Cuba.

Image of Saturn’s shadowed side, and its moon Dione.

The Cassini spacecraft looks to the night side of Saturn and its rings for a view that includes Dione.

Dione (1,123 kilometers, or 698 miles across) is in the top right of the image. Tiny Pandora (81 kilometers, or 50 miles across) can also be seen outside the F ring near the center of the image. Dione was overexposed in this image and has been dimmed by a factor of seven.

This view looks toward the sunlit, northern side of the rings from about 12 degrees above the ringplane.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Sept. 22, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 742 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million kilometers (808,000 miles) from Saturn. Image scale is 72 kilometers (45 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

Great image of the southern sky, details below. Click for a larger image, and if you want the real 111mb monster go here.

The Milky Way arches across this rare 360-degree panorama of the night sky above the Paranal platform, home of ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The image was made from 37 individual frames with a total exposure time of about 30 minutes, taken in the early morning hours. The Moon is just rising and the zodiacal light shines above it, while the Milky Way stretches across the sky opposite the observatory.

The open telescope domes of the world’s most advanced ground-based astronomical observatory are all visible in the image: the four smaller 1.8-metre Auxiliary Telescopes that can be used together in the interferometric mode, and the four giant 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes. To the right in the image and below the arc of the Milky Way, two of our galactic neighbours, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, can be seen.