Spectacular animation of Halley's comet
It's a holiday and I'm enjoying time with the family, so rather than write a lot, I will let a spectacular image do the talking for me. Here is an animation of data from ESA's first interplanetary spacecraft, Giotto, launched to study Halley's comet during its 1986 apparition. These data are incredibly difficult to work with, but finally someone -- an amateur named Daniel Macháček -- came along who carefully reprojected each of the ....

Near Earth Objects and Planetary Defense
Could a space rock hit Earth and cause widespread devastation? What could we do if we found an asteroid or comet on a collision course with Earth? The Planetary Society is working with the Space Generation Advisory Council (SGAC) on getting the word out about hazardous near-Earth objects and what can be done to defend Earth. The Space Generation Advisory Council recently released on their website a 30-minute video about near-Earth objects and ....

Saturn's aurora, even better than before
The Cassini imaging team have posted their own processed and captioned version of the Saturn's aurora movie that I posted a preview of about six weeks ago, and it was worth the wait. It turns out that the video covers an amazing 81 hours of auroral action on Saturn's night side. This version of the video has also been annotated with lines denoting Saturn's limb and latitudes 70 and 78 degrees north latitude. The auroral action occurs at a ....

Two more awesome pictures from the Enceladus flyby
I'm getting to be a broken record here, but I can't stop looking at these photos from the Enceladus flyby. This first one I put together from two of the south polar plume images – you can see all four of the tiger stripes, and the plumes issuing from them, in this wide shot. I mosaicked two images, matching their levels, rotated them 180 degrees to put "ground" at the bottom and "sky" at the top, and filled in a little of the background in the ....

Another great Enceladus shot
Here's a 4-frame mosaic of Enceladus images -- just another everyday spectacularly alien landscape. By the way, if you checked the Cassini raw images website earlier in the day, you should return, because there are more photos from the Enceladus flyby as well as numerous high-resolution shots on Rhea, apparently color frames captured with high sun. I don't yet know their geometry -- I wonder if they'll reveal more of the relatively blue spots ....