Planetary Picture of the Day
Week of June 7, 2021
From Jupiter’s clouds and Saturn’s rings, to seeing our majestic Earthrise from space, enjoy this week’s sampling of what you can find out there if you look.
Monday, June 7, 2021
Earthrise
Taken from the command module Kittyhawk as the Apollo 14 crew was heading back to Earth.
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
Fantastic Martian landscape!
Panorama taken by the Curiosity rover with its MastCam Right camera on sol 3137 (June 3rd, 2021) at approximately 12:50 pm martian local time.
Wednesday, June 9, 2021
A Pair of Wolf-Rayet Stars
The VISIR instrument on ESO’s VLT captured this stunning image of a massive binary star system. Apep is a star system containing two Wolf–Rayet stars that orbit each other. The serpentine swirls surrounding the stars are formed by the collision of two sets of powerful stellar winds, which create the dramatic dust plumes seen in this infrared image.
Thursday, June 10, 2021
A Moon in a Gap
Daphnis, the 8-km wide moon of Saturn makes waves in the Keeler Gap of Saturn's rings using just its gravity -- as it bobs up and down, in and out. The image was produced by Tilmann Denk at Freie Universität in Berlin.
Friday, June 11, 2021
Jupiter’s Bands of Clouds
This enhanced-color image of Jupiter’s bands of light and dark clouds was created by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran using data from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft.
Three of the white oval storms known as the “String of Pearls” are visible near the top of the image. Each of the alternating light and dark atmospheric bands in this image is wider than Earth, and each rages around Jupiter at hundreds of miles (kilometers) per hour. The lighter areas are regions where gas is rising, and the darker bands are regions where gas is sinking. Juno acquired the image on May 19, 2017, at 11:30 a.m. PST (2:30 p.m. EST) from an altitude of about 20,800 miles (33,400 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloud tops.
