Earth From Space: Dune 45 by europeanspaceagency on Flickr.
Via Flickr:
Korea’s Kompsat-2 satellite captured this image over the sand seas of the Namib Desert on 7 January 2012. The blue and white area is the dry river bed of the Tsauchab. Black dots of vegetation are concentrated close to the river’s main route, while salt deposits appear bright white. Running through the river valley, a road connects Sossusvlei to the Sesriem settlement. At the road’s 45th kilometre, seen at the lower-central part of the image, a white path shoots off and ends at a circular parking area at the base of a dune. This is Dune 45, a popular tourist stop on the way to and from Sossusvlei. In this image, there appears to be some shadow on the western side. From this we can deduce that the image was acquired during the late morning.
ESA supports Kompsat as a Third Party Mission, meaning it uses its ground infrastructure and expertise to acquire, process and distribute data to users.
This image is featured on the Earth from Space video programme.
For more information, please click here.
Credits: KARI/ESA
Saturn’s north-pole hurricane close up by europeanspaceagency on Flickr.
Via Flickr:
Spectacular close-up view of Saturn’s north-pole hurricane, as seen by the international Cassini spacecraft, revealing the intricate detail of cloud formations in this dynamic feature.
The images were captured by Cassini from a distance of about 419 000 km from Saturn on 27 November 2012, and are the first close-up views of this storm. Image scale is 2 kilometres per pixel.
The images were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light. The images filtered at 890 nanometres are projected as blue. The images filtered at 728 nanometres are projected as green, and images filtered at 752 nanometres are projected as red. In this scheme, red indicates low clouds and green indicates high ones.
The eye of the hurricane spans about 2000 km and the clouds at the outer edge are travelling at 540 km/h.
The hurricane shares striking similarities to those seen on Earth: both have an eye with no clouds or very low clouds at the centre, high clouds forming an eyewall, with other high clouds spiralling around the eye, and an anticlockwise spin in the northern hemisphere.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
The remains of a star gone supernova by europeanspaceagency on Flickr.
Via Flickr:
These delicate wisps of gas make up an object known as SNR B0519-69.0, or SNR 0519 for short. The thin, blood-red shells are actually the remnants from when an unstable progenitor star exploded violently as a supernova around 600 years ago. There are several types of supernova, but for SNR 0519 the star that exploded is known to have been a white dwarf star — a Sun-like star in the final stages of its life. SNR 0519 is located over 150 000 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Dorado (The Dolphinfish), a constellation that also contains most of our neighbouring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Because of this, this region of the sky is full of intriguing and beautiful deep sky objects. The LMC orbits the Milky Way galaxy as a satellite and is the fourth largest in our group of galaxies, the Local Group. SNR 0519 is not alone in the LMC; the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope also came across a similar bauble a few years ago in SNR B0509-67.5, a supernova of the same type as SNR 0519 with a strikingly similar appearance. A version of this image was submitted to the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures Image Processing Competition by Claude Cornen, and won sixth prize.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA. Acknowledgement: Claude Cornen
Facing Enceladus by europeanspaceagency on Flickr.
Via Flickr:
This face-on colour view of Enceladus was taken by the international Cassini spacecraft on 31 January 2011, from a distance of 81 000 km, and processed by amateur astronomer Gordan Ugarković.
The Cassini–Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA and ASI, the Italian space agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington DC, USA.
For further information, please click here.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/G. Ugarković
ATV-4 fuelling underway at CSG by europeanspaceagency on Flickr.
Aurora over Norway by europeanspaceagency on Flickr.
Earth From Space: America’s Tuscany by europeanspaceagency on Flickr.
Shaking ExoMars by europeanspaceagency on Flickr.
Britains Toy Catalog Space by Astronit on Flickr.
… early Lunar lander design! by x-ray delta one on Flickr.
One ring to rule them all by europeanspaceagency on Flickr.
1956 … ‘Forbidden Planet’ by x-ray delta one on Flickr.
Cosmic “flying V” of merging galaxies by europeanspaceagency on Flickr.
