Outer spacey stuff

[mmcirvin]

Cassini gets its best-ever pictures of Mimas. This will please some of my LJ friends.

First pictures from WISE, including pretty pictures of the Andromeda galaxy and a comet (see also Phil Plait's article). This is a satellite that is designed to keep surveying the whole sky in the infrared. So these pictures aren't super-magnified, narrow-angle views like you'd get from the Hubble telescope; they cover relatively large chunks of the sky, such as you could see with the naked eye, except that you can't see in the infrared and we can't do these observations at all from the ground. The principal investigator is Ned Wright, whose Cosmology Tutorial I have plugged before.

Comments

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

This will please some of my LJ friends.

Only some? Do not all your LJ friends agree about the Cassini pictures? Is there, in other words, a.. division.. among them?

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I hate you, Milkman Dave.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, perhaps not, but rone and Louis were specifically hankering after better pictures of Mimas several years ago, and these are far and away the best ones since Cassini arrived at Saturn (the long delay was for reasons Emily Lakdawalla explains in the linked post: Cassini hasn't often gotten this close in to Saturn, and Enceladus is usually the higher-priority target).

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

They are fantastic. I have been staring fascinated at fuzzy photos of Mimas since Voyager 2 (the kid's book was called The Universe), so seeing this one was sort of neat.

I was kidding.. about the Cassini Division. I'm sure you're aware of that.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Actually, I completely missed that.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

These really are spectacular, and I thank you. It looks like the moon after LASIK.

I also saw Phil Plait's entry; I really need to full-size some of those images and find some way of posterizing them-- I have an office now, with blank walls.