Articles

Emily Lakdawalla

Iapetus! I'm always interested in Cassini images, but five years ago this month I was refreshing the Cassini raw images website several times a day, eagerly anticipating the mission's first good encounter with Iapetus.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's Neptune, but not quite like you've ever seen it before.

Emily Lakdawalla

The Cassini mission announced today the first observation of a specular reflection off of a lake on Titan. A specular reflection is a mirror-like flash, and you only get one when you have a mirror-like surface -- very, very smooth.

Emily Lakdawalla

Proteus is a weird name for this world. It's the second-largest moon of Neptune, and so it's named (as are all of Neptune's moons) for deities associated with the sea.

Emily Lakdawalla

Mimas is the anti-Enceladus.

Emily Lakdawalla

If you don't think Pluto gets enough respect, just imagine what it's like to be a satellite of an asteroid.

Emily Lakdawalla

Cassini's amazing cameras have set a new standard for the quality, sharpness, resolution, beautiful color, and all-around spectacularness of images returned from the outer solar system.

Emily Lakdawalla

This is a special post for all of my readers who are lighting the first candle on their menorot this evening.

Emily Lakdawalla

Welcome to the tenth post in my

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's another weird-looking one, though it's less weird from this particular, polar point of view than it is when viewed from the side.

Emily Lakdawalla

Jupiter has been high overhead at sunset for several months, a brilliant light that's easy to spot even when the sky is still bright at dusk; but it's now moving quickly to the west as Earth speeds ahead of Jupiter's more stately march around the Sun.

Emily Lakdawalla

Galileo, the scientist, discovered the Galilean satellites of Jupiter four hundred years ago next month, while Galileo, the mission, arrived at Jupiter to study those moons in situ fourteen years ago Sunday.

Emily Lakdawalla

Umbriel is the darkest moon in a pretty dark place in the solar system, the Uranus system.

Emily Lakdawalla

Epimetheus is one of the many small moons of Saturn that are referred to by the Cassini mission team as

Emily Lakdawalla

From a distance, Jupiter's fourth largest moon Europa is the smoothest object in the solar system; its outline traces out a perfect circle.

Emily Lakdawalla

I've always loved advent calendars and the way they both managed and heightened my anticipation of the gift-opening frenzy of Christmas morning.

Emily Lakdawalla

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.

Emily Lakdawalla

I'm getting to be a broken record here, but I can't stop looking at these photos from the Enceladus flyby.

Emily Lakdawalla

Wow, just wow. I didn't know what to expect from the second flyby of Saturn's geyser moon Enceladus in November, which happened yesterday.

Emily Lakdawalla

Here's a 4-frame mosaic of Enceladus images -- just another everyday spectacularly alien landscape.