Blogs
Blog Archive
Astrophotos making the web - the good, the bad and the ugly ...
Posted by Daniel Fischer on 2012/10/10 04:18 CDT | 2 comments
Space blogger Daniel Fischer writes about the problem of composited astrophotos being distributed through social media channels by people unaware that they are artworks, not documentary photographs.
Pretty picture: Late afternoon in Gale Crater
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/10/09 05:36 CDT | 3 comments
Curiosity shot a lovely panoramic view of the distant rim of Gale crater in the dramatic lighting of late afternoon on sol 49. Damien Bouic has colorized it, and it is beautiful.
SpaceX's first paid cargo run off to bumpy start
Posted by Jason Davis on 2012/10/08 11:03 CDT | 7 comments
SpaceX successfully sent their first paid Dragon capsule towards the International Space Station Sunday night. But the bigger story happened on the way to orbit.
Happy Cassini PDS Release Day!
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/10/08 01:00 CDT | 2 comments
It's a quarterly feast day for me: the day that the Cassini mission delivers three months' worth of data to NASA's Planetary Data System. Here's a few images processed from the October 1, 2012 data release.
Curiosity Update, sol 57: Digging in at Rocknest
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/10/04 03:27 CDT | 2 comments
Engineers requested that Curiosity be driven to a "nice sandbox" to play in for the first soil sample, and it appears that a sand drift named Rocknest satisfies that requirement.
Curiosity catches sunspots along with Phobos and Deimos transits
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/10/03 07:15 CDT | 2 comments
Curiosity has been shooting photos of the Sun as Phobos and Deimos cross its face, and -- as far as I can tell -- captured sunspots as well.
Beautiful rocks ahead at Glenelg, but first, Curiosity must dig in the sand
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/10/01 05:31 CDT | 4 comments
A beautiful panoramic view of the varied rocks of Glenelg has been transmitted from Curiosity on Mars. But before going any further, it's time to run the first Martian sand through the soil sampling system.
Pretty picture: rocks underfoot at Curiosity's landing site
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/09/17 02:54 CDT | 4 comments
An amateur-processed mosaic of some intriguing-looking broken rocks along Curiosity's traverse. They were intriguing enough to photograph with the Mastcam -- but not enough to stop and check them out, as Curiosity has already rolled on.
Pretty Picture: Eagle's Landing
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/09/13 03:59 CDT
Amateur image processor Tom Dahl's spectacularly high-resolution version of Buzz Aldrin's panoramic view of the Apollo 11 landing site.
A couple of gems from the archives
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/09/10 11:07 CDT | 2 comments
We're still working on migrating content from the old to the new website. This week, that means I am looking, one by one, through some great amateur-processed space images.
MAHLI sees Curiosity's wheels firmly on Martian ground
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/09/10 12:39 CDT | 3 comments
MAHLI opened its "eye" on sol 33, seeing Mars clearly for the first time. On sol 34, Curiosity used MAHLI to survey the parts that Mastcam can't see, including a view right underneath the rover.
Outcrop Ahead for Opportunity!
Posted by Stuart Atkinson on 2012/09/07 01:12 CDT | 1 comments
Oppy is opening an exciting new chapter in her adventure at Cape York. Having driven down to, over and past Whim Creek, she has now explored halfway down Cape York, to a promising fin-like ridge of dark rock.
A Voyager 1 anniversary mosaic
Posted by Björn Jónsson on 2012/09/06 11:58 CDT
Back in 1979 the twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft flew by Jupiter. Some of their images were processed into color images and mosaics that have appeared countless times in books, magazines, on TV and on the Internet. Many of these images and mosaics are spectacular but they were processed more than 30 years ago using computers that are extremely primitive by today's standards. It's possible to get better results by processing the original, raw images from the Voyagers using modern computers and software.
Pretty picture: bizarre spherules
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/09/06 04:25 CDT | 5 comments
A wonderfully strange photo from Opportunity's exploration of Cape York, Endeavour Crater.
Cure for the blues: processing images of a blue planet
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/09/06 01:00 CDT
I noticed today that I hadn't seen any amateur-processed versions of Voyager's departing shots of Uranus, so I decided to give it a try.
Explaining the new black-and-white Mastcam and MARDI raw images
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/08/24 05:05 CDT | 2 comments
If you've been obsessively checking the Curiosity raw images websites for new pictures from Mars, you might have noticed something weird: a bunch of Mastcam images and a few from MARDI that are black-and-white instead of color, and which have a peculiar checkerboard pattern.
The definitive version of Curiosity's first color panorama
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/08/23 06:15 CDT | 8 comments
The top of the mountain has finally been filled in, and Damien Bouic has produced what I think is the definitive version of Curiosity's first color panorama.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/08/22 07:01 CDT | 8 comments
A pretty picture of Cassini's current view of Saturn.
Curiosity sol 15 update: Wheel wiggles, arm flexes, and bad news about REMS
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/08/21 04:26 CDT | 8 comments
Notes from this morning's press conference. Curiosity has successfully steered the corner wheels and deployed and restowed the robotic arm. ChemCam tests went well over the weekend. But one of the two wind speed sensors in REMS appears to have suffered permanent damage during landing.
The first Curiosity 360-degree panorama including the mountain
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/08/18 10:45 CDT | 8 comments
Damien Bouic took Curiosity's Hazcam images of Aeolis Mons / Mount Sharp and merged them with a beautiful 360-degree Navcam panorama to give us our first look at what the view will look like once the mission finally gets higher-resolution images that include the mountain's peak.
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