Almost There: Pluto in a Month

New Horizons is giving Earth the A-OK! All the systems look good and we are only 37.4 million kilometres away from Pluto.  Yes that is far, but considering we usually see Pluto at a distance 200 times that, we are doing pretty well.  The newest processed photos have come in from NASA and John’s Hopkins University, and they are starting to show a complex and mysterious surface chock-full of science goodies that make astronomers salivate like Pavlov’s dog when the bell rang.  But image processing is a science in itself, and I wanted to show you the difference between a raw photo...

Measuring Saturn’s Speedy Rotation

How do we measure the rotation speed of a planet? Exactly as you would expect.  Watch the surface, look for markable features, and time how long it takes until those features pass the same point again in the future.  But how can we possibly nail down this information when the planet has little to no visible surface features.  Gas giant planets are great examples of this.  Jupiter is a bit easier since it has plenty of storms and separated cloud layers along the planet’s rotation axis, but the other three are much tougher.  Aside from hard-to-spot features, gas giants also...