JAXA sets up its Selene YouTube page. Lots of moon videos like the one above, which has been sped up and converted to a gif here (showing only about 1 of every 20 frames). See the full animation here.

The LDEF was the Long Duration Exposure Facility (which I actually remember being released by the Shuttle in 1985) is essentially a drum of science experiments that was just to expose various materials and surfaces to the hostile environment of space. Couldn’t resist posting on this post from thenonist.com that displays a bunch of the individual panels of this thing as artwork.

Don’t really post too many Terrestrial Earth images here becuase it is kind of cheating, but these iceberg images by Ajay Goyal are really nice and remind us of what an exotic planet our home really is. Imagine if these were images returned from a probe on a distant planet.

This image was taken from a Pentax k10d attached to a High Altitude Balloon. It was part of an experiment to test a cosmic radiation detector at Oklahoma State University. See the full flickr set here.

We are back from experiencing technical difficulties.

In June 2007, the Space Shuttle crew (STS-117) visiting the International Space Station (ISS) observed spectacular polar mesospheric clouds over north-central Asia (top). The red-to-dark region at the bottom of the image is the dense part of the Earth’s atmosphere. For more like this see Earth From Space.

Image taken by an astronaut on an extra vehicular activity or “space-walk”.

Better late than never… This is taken from The International Space Station of STS123 a few months back.

Click either image below to load the 4MB high-res tiff file from JAXA. Your will need to be able to read tiff files to view in the browser or click here to download and save the file (right click on the link and choose “save file”).

Near Side

Far (unseen) Side

Also from JAXA.

Japan’s Lunar probe has taken images like this before. Still… just pretty.

I don’t usually post terrestrial images of Earth… but this forces an exception.

This is an image of Earth and the moon acquired by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which is in orbit around Mars. The distance from MRO to Earth at the time the image was taken was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles). Hard to image such details could be drawn out in an image taken from such a distance as that.

A similar image of Jupiter was also acquired by MRO some months ago.

Some of these Moon (Luna) images have been available for a while on the Kaguya website, but just never got around to posting additional images beyond this Earthrise release from a while back.