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Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
An enigmatic line across Pluto: Plutonian canali!?
Pluto and Charon are growing larger in New Horizons' forward view, beginning to develop distinct personalities. A version of recent New Horizons photos processed by Björn Jónsson reveals an enigmatic dark line. Our maps of Pluto's surface are now as good as our maps of Mars and Venus, circa 1900!
A (very) few more details on Pluto
Last week the New Horizons mission released a few new processed versions of their latest and greatest images of Pluto. They're the best images of Pluto that Earth has ever seen, but they're still a long way from what New Horizons will be able to show us, six weeks from now.
Real-time sunset on Mars
Pause your life for six minutes and watch the Sun set....on Mars. Thank you, Glen Nagle, for this awe-inspiring simulation based on Curiosity's sol 956 sunset images.
Tons of fun with the latest Ceres image releases from Dawn
Fantastic new images of Ceres continue to spill out of the Dawn mission, and armchair scientists all over the world are zooming into them, exploring them, and trying to solve the puzzles that they contain.
Rover eyes on rock layers on Mars
Digging in to mission image archives yields similar images of layered Martian rocks from very different places.
Unseen latitudes of comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko -- revealed!
A recent Rosetta image has revealed a good part of the comet's previously hidden southern terrain to the public for the first time.
Sunset on Mars
Long before Curiosity's landing, the description of the color camera made me dream: I imagined what wonderful pictures we could get of sunsets and sunrises on Mars. They finally came on sol 956, the 15th of April, 2015.
New Horizons sees surface features on Pluto, begins raw image release
Today the New Horizons team released a new animation of images taken on approach to Pluto. The animation clearly shows how Pluto wobbles around the Pluto-Charon barycenter. It also shows something more exciting to the scientists: variations in brightness across the surface of Pluto. They also began releasing raw images to the Internet.
Looking Down On Jupiter's North Pole
Ted Stryk shares the most direct view of a Jovian pole ever captured by a spacecraft.
A few gems from the latest Cassini image data release
I checked out the latest public image release from Cassini and found an awesome panorama across Saturn's rings, as well as some pretty views looking over Titan's north pole.
Artist's Drive: A Sol 950 Colorized Postcard
Amateur image processor Damia Bouic shares the process behind creating stunning panoramas with Curiosity images.
Pretty Cassini pictures: animation of Iapetus' north pole, and other fun
Now that Cassini has returned to Saturn's equatorial plane, it has lots of opportunities to observe Saturn's moons. For about a week, Cassini has been taking regular sets of images of Iapetus, which I've assembled into an animation.
Prometheus, Pandora, and the braided F ring in motion
Cassini recently took a long, high-resolution movie of the F ring, catching a view of its ringlets, clumps, and streamers, and two potato-shaped moons, Prometheus and Pandora.
Adding Churyumov-Gerasimenko to my scale comparison of comets and asteroids
Having found a color photo of the comet, I finally added Churyumov-Gerasimenko to my scale comparison of comets and asteroids visited by spacecraft.
Venus From 33 Years Ago, and Why We Need to Explore
Thirty-three years ago today, Venera 14 plunged through the thick Venusian atmosphere to the surface. Ted Styrk shares some of his processed images from the Venera lander missions to Venus—and makes a plea for us to return.
Mapping Europa
Several global maps have been made of Europa, but amateur image processor Björn Jónsson felt they could be improved—so he decided to make a new one.
Cassini begins a year of icy moon encounters with a flyby of Rhea
At last! Cassini is orbiting in Saturn's ring plane again. I do enjoy the dramatic photographs of Saturn's open ring system that Cassini can get from an inclined orbit, and we won't be getting those again for another year. But with an orbit close to the ring plane, Cassini can repeatedly encounter Saturn's icy moons, and icy moon flybys are my favorite thing about the Cassini mission.
HiRISE image coverage of the Curiosity field site on Mars, Version 2.0
There have been tons and tons of HiRISE images of the Curiosity landing region, and it has taken quite a lot of work for me to find, locate, and catalogue them. This post is a summary of what I've found; after four revisions and updates, it's now version 2.0 of the list.
New Churyumov-Gerasimenko Shapemodel!
Mattias Malmer shares his latest shape model of Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, created using data from the Rosetta spacecraft.
Revisiting Uranus with Voyager 2
Amateur image processor Björn Jónsson brings us some new views of Uranus from reprocessed Voyager 2 data.