Space Photos This Week (pretty neat looking)

As the Stars Turn
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Star trails create arches over the horizon in a long-exposure picture of the night sky taken from Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The shot, captured in July and released this week, shows the apparent motion of the stars around Polaris, the star that's almost exactly aligned with Earth's north celestial pole. Also called the North Star, Polaris is the brightest dot in the constellation Ursa Minor. Equatorial regions, such as Kilimanjaro, are the only places on Earth where the celestial poles sit right at the horizon.

Moon Illuminated
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It may look like mold under a microscope, but the above image, released December 15, is actually a map of where sunlight hit the moon's south pole. Over six months, NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took 1,700 pictures of the moon's polar region. Each shot was then converted to a binary image: A pixel was dubbed a one if it was illuminated and a zero if it was dark. Stacking the images generated the illumination map. Understanding which parts of the moon are always in darkness may be key to planning future missions to the moon—at least one permanently dark crater, for instance, seems to hold a significant cache of water ice.

"Colored" by Saturn
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To human eyes, the icy surface of Saturn's moon Rhea would appear fairly monotone. But when viewed in a combination of infrared, ultraviolet, and green wavelengths, Rhea comes alive with color, as seen in a composite picture from NASA's Cassini orbiter released December 20. The shot shows the hemisphere of Rhea that always faces Saturn. The left side of the visible disk faces in the same direction that Rhea orbits around Saturn.

Color differences are most likely due to regional changes in surface composition or the sizes and structures of the grains in the moon's icy soil. Such changes could be driven by debris preferentially hitting certain parts of the moon. The colors could also be caused by an effect called magnetic sweeping, in which charged particles in Saturn's magnetic field sweep over Rhea and become implanted in the soil.

Rainbow Moon
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The moon's highs and lows are revealed in full color in a new topographic map produced by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and released December 17. Using a laser pulse split into five beams, the spacecraft has made the most accurate map yet of the contours of the entire lunar landscape. The above picture shows the moon's southern hemisphere, with higher regions seen in red and low places in blue.

Source: news.nationalgeographic.com...#/space125-star-trails_30759_600x450.jpg

I gotta tell you everytime I see these great photo works it makes me wonder what the heck we are fighting wars and other useless crap we are spending money on.

I want to get to these places (as the Human Race). The older I get I see the frutility of War and the Wastefulness of Man.

If God, or a greater being/presence is looking to us as the settlers of the universe, they got a long wait. Well, I can at least enjoy the photo results.... as you can too. Enjoy.

Be sure to catch the other pics at the article source.

wow! incredible!

Ta for sharing!

reply to post by roguesoul


You're welcome. I would say write more about what you think about them but.....

Just looking at them got me to thinking about what if we Humans are a mistake. A freak of nature-if you will.

And that there is no other beings out there able to develope interlligence etc.

All this stuff going on in Space would still be occurring. Which makes me think about all the stuff that is occurring all over the universe that we have missed, won't/can't see and or don't understand that it was a big event.

Deep man,,,, Deep...

the rainbow moon looks ALOT like rainbow ice cream at wendy's in AUS