... 2002 April 13 . Pwyll: Icy Crater of Europa . Credit: PIRL , Galileo Project , NASA . Explanation: The impact crater Pwyll (a name from Celtic Mythology ) is thought to represent one of the youngest features on the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa . A combination of color and high resolution black and white data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft was used to produce this view looking down on the crater with the sun illuminating the scene from the right. ... About APOD | ...

... December 8, 1996 . Degas Ray Crater on Mercury . ... Explanation : Like the Earth's Moon, Mercury is scarred with craters, testifying to an intense bombardment during the early history of the Solar System. ... In the above mosaic the bright rays emanating from the 27 mile wide Degas crater almost appear to be painted on . The rays consist of light colored material blasted out during the crater's formation. Numerous smaller, younger craters are seen superposed on the Degas crater itself. ...

... Moon . ... What can astronomers tell us about the different colors on the surface of Jupiter's moon Europa? ... We can use the colors of Europa s surface to tell us about the chemical compounds that make up the surface and subsurface of the jovian moon. Even before the first spacecraft made a close visit to Europa, astronomers on Earth used telescopes to study the moon and were able to use a technique called spectroscopy to determine that Europa s surface is composed mostly of water ice. ...

... Data from the Magellan spacecraft has shown the Face of Venus to contain a host of volcanic features. ... A comet nucleus, formed from the primordial stuff of the solar system, resembles a very dirty iceberg. ... After taking its spectacular pictures of the outer solar system planets, Voyager 1 looked back at six planets from the inner solar system. ... Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun, the second hottest planet (Venus gets hotter), and the second smallest planet (Pluto is smaller). ...

... When the Voyager 2 spacecraft flew by the planet Uranus in January 1986, astronomers were treated to their first close-up glimpse of the satellites that orbit the seventh planet. ... But by far the most intriguing of those 15 satellites was a jigsaw-puzzle world called Miranda . ... How dark was it at Miranda? One of the Voyager scientists put it this way: Taking pictures in the Uranus system is like trying to do photography in a ballpark at night when the only light comes from a single candle. ...

Most of these images were obtained by Mike Bessell, Michelle Buxton, Hwankyung Sung, Ralph Sutherland and Bob Watson at SSO using a 2Kx2K Site CCD behind a Nikon or Hasselblad lens or directly on the 1m telescope. A few images are from the Hubble Space Telescope. Some of the M42 images were obtained with the KPNO 1m and ESO NTT telescope. One image is a mosaic of IRAS images. ... Details of the CCD imaging program at MSSSO. ... antenna.jpg (53KB) . ... ngc6744.jpg (59KB) . ...

Venus in visible light (violet filter) 50k gif ; 25k jpg . ... image from Pioneer Venus 15k jpg ; 28k jpg ( caption ) . ... 7 pancake volcanoes, alpha region 227k gif ; 327k jpg . ... Lada Regio, 47 deg S, 25 Long, showing mountains and craters 121k gif ; 321k jpg . ... Gula Mons and Cunitz crater, flat image of gulacun.gif 250k gif ; 178k jpg . ... Crater Farm, Lavinia Region, small 107k gif ; 147k jpg . ... Central Ovida region, 1 deg s by 83 deg 191k gif ; 531k jpg . ... Pictures .. ... Venus .. ...

... The remote planet Pluto and its moon Charon orbit the Sun at a mean distance of almost 6,000 million kilometres, or nearly fourty times farther out than the Earth. During a recent investigation by an international group of astronomers [1], the best picture ever of Pluto and Charon [2] was secured with the European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera at the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). ... The new HST image was taken when Charon was near its maximum elongation from Pluto (0.9 arcseconds). ...