One of the most interesting results of NASA's policy to make its planetary images widely and freely available is that talented photographers around the world have combined and extended the photos to make clearer or wider views of what it's like to be on another world.
A wonderful example can be found at a site for panoramic (360-degree) images, where photographer Andrew Bodrov has made one of the most exciting space images I have yet seen:
http://www.360cities.net/image/mars-gigapixel-panorama-curiosity-solar-days-136-149#-410.49,13.54,42.5
Bodrov stitched together 407 different images from two different cameras aboard the Curiosity rover on the red planet Mars. You can see the rover itself and the "Yellowknife Bay" neighborhood that it was exploring at the time that it did the first experiment drilling into a Mars rock. The large mountain in the distance is Mt. Sharp, the rover's ultimate destination.
I encourage you to play with the image for a while. There are controls at the upper left to help you move around and your cursor also gives you control of the speed and direction with which you move through this rich image. Enjoy the details of the rover's machinery and the wide range of rock formations around the little robot visitor.
This week, 2800 astronomers are gathered in Southern California for the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society and the news from the meeting is coming so fast and furious even seasoned astronomy fans are somewhat overwhelmed. Let me just list a few of the news stories for you for now and we will explore some of them further in future posts.
The picture I have attached above shows new information about the planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, the 17th brightest star in the night sky (and, at a distance of only 25 light years, one of the closer stars to us.) The faint distant planet, one of the first planets outside the solar system to be actually photographed, is shown here in an image from the Hubble Space Telescope.
In the image, the bright star has been covered up by a dark disk (in the middle) that the Hubble telescope can use to block light. That allows us to see the planet and the huge dusty disk surrounding the star. The planet has an orbit that takes it around its star in about 2000 Earth years. (Compare that to a 1-year orbit for Earth and a 12-year orbit for Jupiter.) So some astronomical commentators are suggesting it might be more of a giant comet or a distant ice-dwarf (like Pluto) and not really the kind of planet we first think of when we talk about planets.
In a related story, the Kepler mission team, searching for planets that "eclipse" their stars (see earlier posts of mine on this mission), is reporting 461 new planet candidates, bringing their total number of possible planets to 2,740! Four of the new candidates are less than twice the size of Earth and orbiting where conditions are Earth-like.
Nest, teams of astronomers using orbiting telescopes have filed the most detailed "weather report" yet about clouds in the atmosphere of a "brown dwarf" -- the name we give to a failed star. These objects begin life like stars do, but can't keep making energy in the way our Sun and others stars can. It's amazing that we can now probe for the existence of Earth-sized clouds in the outer layers of these remote, faint objects.
Plus there is the possible discovery of floating icebergs on Saturn's moon Titan, an asteroid belt around the bright star Vega, and much more. (The reason there is so much news all at once is that astronomers save their discoveries for announcement at this annual winter meeting, so they can share the results with their colleagues and argue about them right then and there. With almost 3000 astronomers gathered in the same convention center, there is a good clump of experts to dissect and admire each discovery.)
More details in posts to come.
This magnificent (but artificial color) image of the ringed planet Saturn was assembled and enhanced from 60 different pictures taken with the Cassini spacecraft. You are looking up at Saturn from a perspective below its rings, at a time when the Sun happened to be directly behind Saturn. Thus we are seeing the planets and the rings back-lit, something we can never see from Earth.
The image is constructed not merely with visible light pictures, but also with some in the infra-red (commonly called heat rays). So this is not what your eyes would see if you (like Cassini) were orbiting Saturn -- this is a view only our sophisticated instruments can make available. And the details have been enhanced to show you the complex structure of Saturn's rings (made up of billions of chunks of mostly water ice, all moving around the equator of Saturn in a traffic pattern so vast it puts the Los Angeles freeway system to shame.)
From one side to the other, Saturn's giant ring system spans 170,000 miles across. This means that if you were to take the ring system off Saturn and put it next to the Earth, it would almost fill the space between the Earth and the Moon.
Near the top of the picture, you see the round dark shadow that Saturn casts on its own rings. Below that shadow, the greenish glow is light reflected from the rings on to the cloudtops of Saturn.
The pictures that make up this fantastic mosaic were taken from a distance of about 500,000 miles from Saturn (quite close in astronomical terms.) Just look at all the structure you can see in the ring system, which consists of many, many ringlets.
What a beautiful holiday ornament this planet makes! Happy Holidays.
