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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.
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.
An alien moon, photographed from the surface of an alien world
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/09/26 12:10 CDT | 8 comments
Curiosity has successfully photographed a crescent Phobos in a bright daylit Martian sky.
A 3D photo album of Endeavour at Edwards Air Force Base
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/09/20 11:01 CDT | 7 comments
I drove up to Edwards Air Force Base today to see the shuttle carrier aircraft NASA 905 carry in the space shuttle Endeavour, which will be delivered to Los Angeles tomorrow. I'm not a great photographer but I do have a 3D camera; here's an album.
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.
Curiosity sol 38 update: arm tests done, on the road again, and an important question answered
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/09/14 06:28 CDT
Curiosity has completed Commissioning Activity Period 2 and is on the road again. I asked Daniel Limonadi to explain a couple of the photos of tests being performed on CHIMRA, and took the opportunity to ask him an amusing question that came up during a previous Google+ Hangout.
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.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/09/07 11:24 CDT | 3 comments
Curiosity's much-anticipated self-portrait with the MAHLI camera just arrived on Earth, and even though it was shot through the dust cover it is AWESOME.
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.
Following up the dark spot on Uranus
Posted by Heidi Hammel on 2012/09/04 06:38 CDT | 2 comments
It was a surprise and delight to have our Icarus paper highlighted in Emily Lakdawalla's blog. Thanks for highlighting Uranus, since it has gotten, ahem, a bum rap over the years. Here's more about our discovery of the dark spot on Uranus.
HiRISE's best view of Curiosity yet
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/08/31 12:50 CDT | 10 comments
HiRISE's best opportunity to view Curiosity so far came 12 days after landing, when the orbiter passed nearly directly overhead. The photo resolves amazing detail on the huge rover.
An unheralded anniversary
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Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2012/08/28 11:57 CDT | 16 comments
Yesterday, August 27th, 2012, was, in a sense, the 50th anniversary of interplanetary travel. Fifty years ago yesterday, Mariner 2 launched toward Venus, and became the first object to leave Earth and travel to another world.
Posted by Bill Gray on 2012/08/25 10:55 CDT | 4 comments
An update on China's second lunar orbiter, Chang'e 2, which is now heading for asteroid Toutatis.
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.
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