Iapetus in color again

[mmcirvin]

This is an attempt at a natural-color picture, from RGB filters:



There's just a slight brownish tint there. You can see the end of the mysterious equatorial mountain range coming in over the horizon on the left. It looks like it runs out not far from the edge of the biggest crater.

Comments

[muffyjo]

Sure, and the shadow in its particular configuration makes it look like part of it is missing as well.

Did you have any ideas on kids' sites?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I don't know much about kids' sites, but for a 12-year-old who's interested in astronomy, I'd say that a lot of the "adult interested layperson" material would be appropriate and comprehensible. The Planetary Society (http://www.planetary.org/home/) just redesigned their site and there's a tremendous amount of good stuff there. NASA's Astronomy PIcture of the Day (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html) is usually incredibly cool and the captions have links to associated material; it's a good place to start exploring. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory home page (http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/) is good for keeping up with planetary exploration, and the Cassini home page (http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm) is frequently updated with interesting things.

Most of the government and nonprofit sites have "for kids" sections too, of varying quality.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, also, people who talk about exploration of the solar system sometimes forget the biggest piece of all, the Sun. Observing the Sun safely by yourself takes special precautions (astronomers yell about how you'll put your eye out so much that it becomes comical, but it's true, you really can put your eye out, especially with a telescope; she'll want to read up on proper procedures).

But fortunately, two of the spacecraft that study the Sun full-time have awesome web sites: I've always been partial to the TRACE image of the day (http://trace.lmsal.com/POD/TRACEpod.html) (a bit chaotic, but full of gorgeous pictures), and also SOHO's raw image feed (http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/).