Friday, November 17, 2006

APOD


This storm on the southern pole of Saturn, taken by the Cassini spacecraft, has been raging for billions of years at wind speeds twice those of the strongest category five hurricanes here on Earth. The Cassini used its Imaging Science Subsystem at a wide-angle lens to photograph this phenomona, which stretches more than 8,000 kilometers across, much larger than Earth's. It's unknown why the storm is stuck to the pole, but it's expected to stay put there for billions of years. To give you a scope of the scale of the picture, each pixel represents approximatley 17 kilometers. The image has an area of 302,400 pixels. Multiiply that by 17, and you get 5,140,800 kilometers if I did my math correctly. Wow.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Apod


This image, taken by Cassini, shows Janus, a potato-shaped moon of Saturn. Janus has a highly irregular orbit, and frequently trades places with another irregularly-shaped moon, Epimetheus. At its largest diameter, it's 190 kilometers across. Since only fairly large craters are visible to the Cassini, it's been hypothesized that a layer of fine duct covers the planet, hiding the smaller craters. This fine dust layer is believed to be on the moons Pandora and Telesto too.This particular photo was captured by Cassini in late September.

Friday, November 03, 2006

APOD



This is a spectacular image of the crescents of both the moon and Venus. This sight requires the use of a binocular telescope at the least to view, since it's too small for the naked eye alone. This image takes place right before an occultation, and Venus passed behind the moon, and reappeared an hour later.This picture was taken in Budapest, Hungary with a Nikon Coolpix 4300, which you can get at Amazon.com for just under $200. Venus is the brightest planet we can see in the solar system, and is only slightly smaller than the Earth. It has a dense atmoshere which fosters the hottest surface temperature of all the innner planets.