I found some pretty space pictures. The first one has 3 views of the Andromeda galaxy from the Spitzer infrared telescope. The Andromeda galaxy is the big galaxy 2.5 to 2.9 million light years away from our Milky Way galaxy. That means the light the telescope saw was traveling for about two and a half to three million years to get from the galaxy to it. The top picture is an infrared picture of the dust bands. It's the most detailed picture ever of the dust in another galaxy. The lower left picture is the galaxy in visible light. The dust is in the dark bands visible against the starlight. The lower right picture is a combination of pictures at 3 wavelengths. This was made a year after the launch of the telescope.
You can see this galaxy yourself if you go to a dark place like in the country. Its angular size is several times bigger than that of the full moon in our sky, but it doesn't look that big because the easiest part to see is the bright core.
The Andromeda is moving towards our galaxy, which makes it one of the few galaxies to have a blueshift. They say that it'll start to merge with our galaxy in 3 billion years.
The second picture is closer to home. It's a Cassini picture of Dione against Saturn. You can see the rings almost edge on and their shadows on Saturn. Saturn's axis is tilted, so that in Saturn's current position in its orbit, the rings cast their shadows onto Saturn's north hemisphere. Dione is an icy world 1118 km across. One side has wispy white lines. You can see some of them on the left side. There are more over on the other side. Before, it was thought that they were made of white material deposited on the surface. They seemed flat because the only pictures of them were Voyager pictures of them taken from a great distance a quarter century ago. Now we know that they're really icy cliffs at tectonic fractures. Cassini came within 500 km of Dione on October 11 and saw the cliffs from the side, as shown in the third picture. They're up to several hundred meters high.
You can see this galaxy yourself if you go to a dark place like in the country. Its angular size is several times bigger than that of the full moon in our sky, but it doesn't look that big because the easiest part to see is the bright core.
The Andromeda is moving towards our galaxy, which makes it one of the few galaxies to have a blueshift. They say that it'll start to merge with our galaxy in 3 billion years.
The second picture is closer to home. It's a Cassini picture of Dione against Saturn. You can see the rings almost edge on and their shadows on Saturn. Saturn's axis is tilted, so that in Saturn's current position in its orbit, the rings cast their shadows onto Saturn's north hemisphere. Dione is an icy world 1118 km across. One side has wispy white lines. You can see some of them on the left side. There are more over on the other side. Before, it was thought that they were made of white material deposited on the surface. They seemed flat because the only pictures of them were Voyager pictures of them taken from a great distance a quarter century ago. Now we know that they're really icy cliffs at tectonic fractures. Cassini came within 500 km of Dione on October 11 and saw the cliffs from the side, as shown in the third picture. They're up to several hundred meters high.