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Welcome to Beautiful Mars!

beautifulmars:

Hello all! This is the official tumblr for HiRISE, the high resolution camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. If you’re new to HiRISE, here’s a quick intro.

We are the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet. MRO launched in 2005 and in 2006, we were into aerobraking mode to get us into the proper orbit. Since then, HiRISE has been taking high resolution images of Mars, covering just 1 percent (!) of the surface. 

We have over 28,500 images that we make available on our website, uahirise.org. Every Wednesday we release up to four new captioned images so that you can know what you’re looking at. We also make slides, tabloid-sized flyers, wallpaper, audio and video clips available as well.

You can follow us on Twitter (@HiRISE) and like us on Facebook. We’ve got more to tell you about, but for now, thank you for following us on Tumblr!

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ikenbot: Big Crater Down South A large crater can be seen in the southern hemisphere of Saturn’s two-tone moon Iapetus. Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Iapetus (914 miles, or 1,471 kilometers across), a moon whose leading hemisphere is extremely dark and whose trailing hemisphere is as white as snow. This view looks toward the moon’s south polar region, which is visible near the lower limb of the moon. The south pole itself is in the unilluminated area immediately to the left of the terminator.
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ikenbot: Japetus Saturn Moon RGB Compose Data Opus Nasa Pds
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ikenbot: NGC 6888 (Sh2-105, Crescent Nebula) - emission nebula and Wolf-Rayet star WR 136 (HD 192163) in Cygnus.
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ikenbot: Sequoia Galaxy
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ikenbot: via Neil deGrasse Tyson
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geologise: Conjunctions near Dawn Image Credit & Copyright: Luis Argerich Explanation: Now shining in eastern skies at dawn, bright planets Venus and Jupiter join the Pleiades star cluster in this sea and sky scape, recorded earlier this week near Buenos Aires, Argentina. Venus dominates the scene that includes bright star Aldebaran just below and to the right. The planets are easy to spot for early morning risers, but this sky also holds two of our solar system’s small worlds, Vesta and Ceres, not quite bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye. The digital camera’s time exposure just captures them, though. Their positions are indicated when you put your cursor over the image. In orbit around Vesta, NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arrived there last July, but is nearing the end of its visit to the main belt asteroid. In August, it will set off on its planned journey to Ceres, arriving at the dwarf planet in 2015.
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the-star-stuff: Milky Way Down Under by Russ Brown
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ikenbot: Delta Sunrise
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