BevelGear

Voyager 1 image of Saturn and its ring taken Nov. 16, 1980 four days after closest approach to Saturn, from a distance of 5,300, 000 km (3,300,000 miles). This viewing geometry, which shows Saturn as a crescent, is never achieved from Earth. The Saturnian rings, like the cloud tops of Saturn itself, are visible because they reflect sunlight. The translucent nature of the rings is apparent where Saturn can be seen through parts of the rings. Other parts of the rings are so dense with orbiting ice particles that almost no sunlight shines through them and a shadow is cast onto the yellowish cloud tops of Saturn, which in turn, casts a shadow across the rings at right. The black strip within the rings is the Cassini Division, which contains much less orbiting ring material than elsewhere in the rings.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/pia00335-3/

Asteroid Didymos (bottom left) and its moonlet, Dimorphos, about 2.5 minutes before the impact of NASA’s DART spacecraft. The image was taken by the on board DRACO imager from a distance of 570 miles (920 kilometers). This image was the last to contain a complete view of both asteroids. Didymos is roughly 2,500 feet (780 meters) in diameter; Dimorphos is about 525 feet (160 meters) in length. Ecliptic north is toward the bottom of the image. This image is shown as it appears on the DRACO detector and is mirror flipped across the x-axis from reality.

CREDIT

NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

Raspberry Pi 4 running RetroPie

Observations of our neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda, made using ESA’s Flyeye telescope.

Andromeda appears so large in Earth’s sky that in angular size it is six times the diameter of the full Moon and it can be seen with the unaided eye in dark skies.

For a dedicated astronomical telescope such as the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, viewing the whole Andromeda galaxy requires stitching together hundreds of individual observations. This Hubble image of Andromeda, for example, took over 10 years and 600 snapshots to make.

Flyeye, on the other hand, is a survey telescope designed to see as much of the sky at once as possible, and to rapidly scan for new near-Earth objects. This image of Andromeda takes up just one sixteenth of the telescope’s full field of view.

The image was acquired during the telescope’s ‘first light’ campaign by combining 16 exposures, each of 30 seconds.

CREDIT

ESA

https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Week_in_images/Week_in_images_02-06_June_2025