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Stories, updates, insights, and original analysis from The Planetary Society.
HiWishing for 3D Mars images, part III
The final article of a three-part series of images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera.
Pretty Panoramas: Opportunity at Whim Creek
I know it’s been all Curiosity, all the time on this blog for the last couple of weeks, and that’s not likely to change much for the next couple of weeks. But I don’t want people to forget that there’s another rover exploring Mars’ ancient geology. Opportunity has been taking spectacular photos of Whim Creek and Endeavour Crater this last week.
Birth of a New Moon
As astronaut Don Pettit prepared for his return to Earth, he tweeted several beautiful shots from the Space Station.
HiWishing for 3D Mars images, part II
Part two of a three-part series of images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera.
Pretty picture: Meet Tethys
Just a pretty global view of one of Saturn's flock of icy moons, newly processed from archival data by Gordan Ugarkovic.
HiWishing for 3D Mars images, part I
Hundreds of images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera are publicly available, if you know where to look.
Pretty picture: Halo on a halo?
An interesting set of images of Titan that Cassini took recently shows a peculiar cap at Titan's south pole.
Artist's views of a night sky transformed by a galaxy merger
A measurement of the Andromeda galaxy's proper motion shows it's coming directly at us, and will collide with the Milky Way in 4 billion years. The event will transform the appearance of our night sky.
A solar eclipse - as viewed from the Moon
A solar eclipse isn't just a spiffy sight to Earthlings; it looks pretty cool to lunar dwellers as well.
Methone, an egg in Saturn orbit?
Cassini obtained its first high-resolution images of Methone on May 20, 2012. Methone is one of the smallest regular moons of Saturn, having a diameter of only about 3 kilometers. It was the first moon that Cassini discovered, very early in Cassini's mission at Saturn, in 2004.
A stunning view of Mars from Argyre to Thaumasia
Image magician Daniel Machacek has done it again, producing a jaw-dropping view of Mars from Viking Orbiter 1, featuring a frosty Argyre basin and stretching across to a series of faults called Thaumasia Fossae.
Cool video: Jupiter, its moons, a comet, and...the Sun?
Here's a neat video posted by SungrazerComets (the Twitter identity of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's Sungrazing Comets website) this morning.
In Honor of JUICE, a New View of Europa
To celebrate ESA's selection of the JUICE mission to Jupiter, Ted Stryk produced a new global view of Europa from Galileo data.
Pretty pictures from Cassini's 1 May 2012 Dione flyby
Cassini performed its last of three close encounters with Enceladus for 2012 two days ago, and followed the flyby with some spectacular images of Dione.
3D view of an unnamed lunar crater
Grab your red-blue 3D glasses and dive in to this small but spectacular unnamed lunar crater as seen in a Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photo.
Swirly lava patterns in beautiful HiRISE images
In a channel near a pedestal crater on the plains of Cerberus Palus, Mars, there are wacky swirl patterns.
Ski Helene?
I enthused about these Helene images the first time they came down from Cassini, and then forgot about them, and then was thrilled anew a couple of weeks ago when Daniel Macháček posted his version, processed from data published by the Cassini imaging team on April 1.
Pretty pictures from Cassini's weekend flybys of Enceladus and Tethys
Cassini flew past both Enceladus and Tethys on April 14. Here's a cool animation of its approach to Enceladus' plumes, and a pretty global picture of Tethys.
Pretty Pictures: Amazing Asteroid Lutetia
A long-awaited data set is finally public (well, long-awaited by me, at least). The Rosetta team has now published their data from the July 10, 2010 flyby of asteroid (21) Lutetia. This data set is absolutely stunning, and my friends in the amateur image processing community wasted no time in creating art out of it.
Nearly the last view of Endeavour with its life-blood flowing
After 12 years of photographing the space shuttle, and even getting to work for NASA as a photographer for the final three years of the program, I never had the privilege of going inside the cockpit until the program was over.



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