April 10, 2017

Aurora over Indian Ocean seen from the International Space Station

Aurora over Indian Ocean seen from the International Space Station

This is one of a series of night time images photographed by one of the Expedition 29 crew members from the International Space Station. It features Aurora Australis, airglow, Earth's Terminator and parts of the southeast Indian Ocean. Nadir coordinates are 51.53 degrees south latitude and 129.80 degrees east longitude.

ISS, Orbit of the Earth
September 18, 2011

Image Credit: NASA

Jupiter's Atmosphere

Jupiter's Atmosphere

NASA's Juno spacecraft skimmed the upper wisps of Jupiter's atmosphere when JunoCam snapped this image on February 2 at 5:13 a.m. PT (8:13 a.m. ET), from an altitude of about 9,000 miles (14,500 kilometers) above the giant planet's swirling cloudtops.

Streams of clouds spin off a rotating oval-shaped cloud system in the Jovian southern hemisphere. Citizen scientist Roman Tkachenko reconstructed the color and cropped the image to draw viewers' eyes to the storm and the turbulence around it.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Roman Tkachenko
Explanation from: https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA21383

Saturn

Saturn

Although only a sliver of Saturn's sunlit face is visible in this view, the mighty gas giant planet still dominates the view.

From this vantage point just beneath the ring plane, the dense B ring becomes dark and essentially opaque, letting almost no light pass through. But some light reflected by the planet passes through the less dense A ring, which appears above the B ring in this photo. The C ring, silhouetted just below the B ring, lets almost all of Saturn's reflected light pass right through it, as if it were barely there at all. The F ring appears as a bright arc in this image, which is visible against both the backdrop of Saturn and the dark sky.

This view looks toward the unilluminated side of the rings from about 7 degrees below the ring plane. The image was taken in green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on January 18, 2017.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 630,000 miles (1 million kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is 38 miles (61 kilometers) per pixel.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
Explanation from: https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA20530