The Best Space Photos From This Week
Every day satellites are zooming through space, snapping incredible pictures of Earth, the solar system, and outer space. Here are the highlights from this week.
Top image:
Sentinel-2 takes us over the border of the US states Utah and Colorado to Uintah Basin.
Rivers cut through the landscape, along which we can see patches of agriculture appearing bright red in this false-colour image – a stark contrast to the less-vegetated areas across the semi-arid region.
Crab Nebula from Five Different Telescopes
In the summer of the year 1054 AD, Chinese astronomers saw a new "guest star" that appeared six times brighter than Venus. So bright in fact, it could be seen during the daytime for several months.
This "guest star" was forgotten about until 700 years later with the advent of telescopes. Astronomers saw a tentacle-like nebula in the place of the vanished star and called it the Crab Nebula.
Saturn's Polar Jet Stream
Saturn's hexagonal polar jet stream is the shining feature of almost every view of the north polar region of Saturn. The region, in shadow for the first part of the Cassini mission, now enjoys full sunlight, which enables Cassini scientists to directly image it in reflected light.
The Sun's Shifting Plasma
Strands of solar material at the sun's edge shifted and twisted back and forth over a 22-hour period in this footage captured May 2-3, 2017, by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.
To give a sense of scale, the strands that hover above the sun are more than several times the size of Earth.
The Hargraves Crater of Mars
The collision that created Hargraves Crater impacted into diverse bedrock lithologies of ancient Mars. As a result, the impact ejecta is a rich mix of rock types with different colors and textures, as seen by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
For more out-of-this-world views, you might want to check out our compilation of the best space photos from April.