The highest resolution image ever taken of Earth. You really should click on it to see it in the original size.

Titan and friends from recent official Cassini mission releases.

Shown with Saturn

Shown with Dione against a Saturn and rings nearly edge-on in the background. Looks like a NASA re-interpretation of this image.

With Tethys against more edge-on rings.

Brought (as always) to us from Gordan Ugarkovic.

I last wrote about this mission in 2007. Now it is actually upon us. So never mind the launch… what is remarkable about this trip is when it arrives. JPL commissioned this incredible animation that is so real you feel like it was videotaped live. This is expected to take place August of 2012.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

You Are The Sun is the latest space themed tee by Chop Shop Store. Following on iconic tees that collected various deep space missions and historic Earth orbit missions, this new design draws a new picture of The Solar System as we know it today, complete with Carl Sagan’s pale blue dot.

With your head as a stand-in for The Sun — the tee includes all 8 planets, 7 major moons, The Asteroid Belt and even details little Pluto lost among countless Kuiper Belt objects. We are now providing yet another link here to get it for Men on American Apparel 2001 or Tultex tees and for Women on American Apparel 2102 tees.

Another new near global image of Ganymede by Ted Stryk. He has been producing new views of this Galilean moon for a while now from the old Galileo image sets which were compromised by a glitch that effected the entire mission.

Click on it… it’s large.

I just found this on Gordan Ugarkovic’s Flickr page. I just sped up the frame rate.

We have posted many images and preview clips for outsideinthemovie before. Here is another look at some preview stills from an opening scene to be unveiled at an event on Sept 17th in Austin, TX. Steven Van Vuuren — the film’s creator — tells us these images begin a pan out from Earth to the surface of the moon which culminates in a trip through the Solar System on the way out to Saturn.

For those who may not recall, the film’s focus is on the Cassini Mission at Saturn and uses only real flat image photography returned from robotic spacecraft in a new technique developed by Van Vuuren that feels 3 dimensional. No renders will be employed and is therefore — a more realistic trip through interplanetary space than anything we have seen before.

The Dawn Spacecraft has been orbiting at Vesta for some time now. Surely some great science, but visually we are looking at an object that reminds us very much of the Martian moon Phobos. And like so many of the smaller rocky bodies of the inner solar system — up close, most images could easily pass for Apollo images of our own moon.

However, there are some things we haven’t seen very much of on rocky surfaces like Vesta. Dark and light ejecta material reminds us more of what we see at Iapetus and Hyperion (both Saturnian moons) — which are largely moons of ice.

The grooves which nearly reach all the way around Vesta are very similar to the grooves found on Phobos (a rocky Martian moon). Many scientists believe those lines came from the cataclysmic event that formed Stickney Crater which nearly shattered the small moon, but instead left behind rippled scars as gravity pulled it all back together. Similarly, an enormous crater at the Vesta’s south seems to correspond to these multiple ridges.

And a tiny little “ring shepherd” moon can be seen directly above/left of Dione.

By Gordan Ugarkovic

Juno is the first mission to study Jupiter since Galileo in the 90s and will arrive around July of 2016. The new imaging event on this encounter will be seeing the poles of Jupiter for the first time in great detail. The camera fitted to Juno are specifically for public consumption and promotion and less about science. It will be nice to have an instrument specifically dedicated to securing amazing images.

We posted a similar image of an Io and Europa mutual event from the New Horizons mission a few years back when it zipped past Jupiter on its long journey to Pluto. Our hero of freelancer image compositing Gordan Ugarkovic now presents to us a much better view.

I count at least 4 if not 5 active eruption on Io in this version. The level of detail improvement from the same encounter is amazing. Old missions keep getting newer.

No sad notes here. The program should have been replaced 10 years ago. Note the aurora in the background.