Our new Kickstarter campaign will be live in a few days. Above are a few of the celestial assets illustrated for the animation/video we are producing for the campaign page.

There is so little to see here, but to think that New Horizons arrives at this impossibly distant world next year is unreal. Other than some fairly minor bodies, after Pluto and Ceres are visited in 2015 — every major target of interest in the solar system that most of us grew up with will have been visited at least once by robotic spacecraft.

And you thought the Voyager mission was over. A crescent Triton as seen by Voyager on August 25, 1989. Image by Gordan Ugarkovic.

A new imager turning out some impressive work on the Rosetta mission has popped up on flickr. These are not only gorgeous, but are the first color images I have seen of the comet thus far. Check out 2di7 & titanio44’s image feed and see not only more color images of the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, but also great work done at Mars and Saturn as well.

Image Notes: The original of the first image above can be seen here. What is posted here was cleaned up a bit by wanderingspace.net and is not intended for scientific use. We did the best to represent what is in the original, but telling the difference between what might have been boulders and what was image noise is hard to determine. Also, the jets were reprocessed and altered to appear smooth in this final version. More on the color below.

Image Notes: According to the imagers, there have been no filtered images released as of this date of Comet 67P/CG. Which means that the color above is artistic interpretation. Strikingly real looking, but still just a make-shift approach to consider what the color might be before any real data on color has been released by ESA.

Honored to have @exploreplanets (#planetarysociety) crowd-source our next @kickstarter campaign. More to come 10/1 pic.twitter.com/MNeuXy00lQ

— wanderingspace.net (@wndrngspc) September 19, 2014

Also worth noting is our new Twitter feed now available twitter.com/wndrngspc.

Whoa RT @Astro_Alex: I never imagined that flying to space would give me a different view of our entire galaxy. pic.twitter.com/6mzvOczsR3

— Emily Lakdawalla (@elakdawalla) September 19, 2014

With the term “selfie” trending the way it is in popular culture… it was wise for the people at ESA to try a robotic interplanetary version. This image was shot by the Philae lander (still attached to Rosetta) staring down one of Rosetta’s solar panels looking at comet 67P/C-G in not-too-far-off distance.

Worth noting this similarly happened here at Mars in 2007.

Discover online has an article today about some of the best in amateur space imaging. Many of which have been featured here on Wanderingspace before like Gordan Ugarkovic, Emily Lakdawalla and Bjorn Jonsson to name a few. The last item from Bill Dunford of Riding With Robots is an image that he actually suggested NASA point their HiRise cameras at that location. He suspected they might find something interesting there and they did —flash water movement and evidence of avalanches.

New global mosaic Voyager 2 images of Neptune by Björn Jónsson.

Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko (aka CG-67P) is showing the early formation of it’s jets. Those jets are what cause the formation of the most distinguishing characteristic of any comet — it’s tail. The Rosetta spacecraft is currently in orbit about the comet and it is assumed that as the pair orbit closer to the sun, these jets will become much more active and should provide quite a show for us. The Rosetta team has also recently shared the potential landing sites for it’s Philae Lander in November shown here.

This image was brought to the world by Emily Lackdawalla’s Planetary Blog.

A fine, fine portrait of Saturn for #30! Created by Ian Regan. There is also an amazing “enhanced” version of the same image going around on Twitter.