Category: Where In the Universe?

Its time once again for another Where In The Universe Challenge. The goal of this challenge is to test your skills and knowledge of the cosmos. Guess where in the Universe this image is from, and give yourself extra points if you can guess which spacecraft is responsible for the image. Post your guess in the comment section (no links to hints please!) and check back tomorrow for the answer. Good luck!

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below.

As many of you said, this is an image from the Mars Pathfinder rover, Sojouner. The rock was named “Yogi” and is a meter-size rock located about 5 meters northwest of the Mars Pathfinder lander and was the second rock visited by the Sojourner Rover’s alpha proton X-ray spectrometer (APXS) instrument. To get one picture of the entire rock, it took several pictures stitched together in a mosaic, combining four “Super Pan” frames taken with the Sojouner’s camera. This composite color mosaic consists of 7 frames from the right eye, taken with different color filters that were enlarged by 500% and then co-added using Adobe Photoshop to produce, in effect, a super-resolution panchromatic frame that is sharper than an individual frame would be.

Doing this, scientists were able to address questions about the texture of this rock and what it might tell us about its mode of origin.

This is the approximate the true color of Mars. The shadow around Yogi looks a little funny, because shadows were processed separately from the rest of the rock and combined with the rest of the scene to bring out details in the shadow of Yogi that would be too dark to view at the same time as the sunlit surfaces. This resulted in the unusual color fringing at the edges of the shadow.

So, there you have it, a little blast from the past from Pathfinder. I hope you enjoyed this image, and check back next week for another WITU challenge.

Its time once again for another Where In The Universe Challenge. And this is the official WITU challenge for this week, even though Anne’s article today about the mystery blob is another challenge. But we’ll let the professional astronomers handle that mystery! The goal of this challenge is to test your skills and knowledge of the cosmos. This week’s image was sent in by one of our regular readers, Vino. Guess where in the Universe this image is from and give yourself extra points if you can guess if a spacecraft or another type of instrument is responsible for the image. Post your guess in the comment section (no links to hints please, and no torturing Vino to get her to tell the answer!) Just check back tomorrow to find out the answer. Good luck!

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below.

Well, Vino, we didn’t fool everyone. As some of you guessed, this is a beach (although no one guessed which beach!) But it really does look like the surface of a moon or Mercury. Vino took this picture last year of the beaches of the Blackpool resort in the UK. “I didn’t realise the picture would turn out the way it did when I took it,” Vino said. “These were the result of tides….and completely camouflaging. I fooled a few of my friends as well.”

Thanks for sharing your picture, Vino! And if anyone else has images they would like to share or suggest for future WITU challenges, send them to me at nancyatkinson04 at yahoo.com.

Check back next week for another Where In The Universe Challenge!

It’s Wednesday, so that means its time for another “Where In The Universe” challenge to test your visual knowledge of the cosmos. See if you can name where in the Universe this image is from, and give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. Make your guess and post a comment, but please no links to the answer. Check back sometime on Thursday to find the answer and see how you did.

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below. Don’t peek at the answer until you make your guess!

This is Waw An Namus, (or also called Uau En Namus) which is a volcano in south-central Libya. It was photographed from the Space Shuttle on mission STS-52. I love the description of this landform on the referring webpage from Oregon State:

“A low caldera about 4 km in diameter is surrounded by a 5 – 10 km wide dark black deposit of ash that stands out starkly against the yellowish desert. The few people who have visited have been struck by its beauty: The Italian geologist Angelo Pesce wrote that as seen from the rim, one is “overwhelmed by a scene of rare beauty….Inside, the only thing one wishes is to be alone and wander in admiration from one end to the other.” But Pesce also complains about the “veritable cloud of mosquitoes, which not having many occasions to feed on fresh blood warmly welcome visitors to their desert realm. The Arabic word Namus means mosquito.”

Not sure I’d want to take a stroll through the clouds of mosquitoes!

This image was actually suggested by our publisher, Fraser Cain. We were hoping people would think it might be Io, which a few of you guessed. If anyone else has any suggestions for a Where In The Universe Challenge, email me at nancyatkinson04 at yahoo.com

Check back next week for another WITU Challenge!

Its time once again for another Where In The Universe Challenge. The goal of this challenge is to test your skills and knowledge of the cosmos. Guess where in the Universe this image is from, and give yourself extra points if you can guess which spacecraft is responsible for the image. Post your guess in the comment section (no links to hints please!) and check back tomorrow for the answer. Good luck!

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below. (Don’t peek before you make your guess!)

This image is a zoomed in look at one region of the Rosette Nebula, taken by the Chandra X-ray Telescope, showing a group of hot, young stars. The nebula is about 5,000 light years from Earth, and we see it in the constellation Monoceros. The colors represent various levels of X-ray energy: red shows low-energy (0.5-2 keV) and blue shows high-energy (2-8 keV) X-rays. Chandra took the image back in January of 2001. For more info on the image and the Rosette Nebula, check out the Chandra website and their description of the image.

Hope you enjoyed this image — check back next week for another WITU Challenge!

Are you ready for another Where In The Universe Challenge? Take a look and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. As usual, we’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section — if you dare! Check back tomorrow on this same post to see how you did. Good luck!

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below.

This image was taken on On March 4, 2009, by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. It is not plane contrails as some have suggested, but clouds that formed over the northeast Pacific Ocean that form around the particles in ship exhaust. This image shows how these ship “tracks” are different from the natural marine clouds in the same area. You can see a natural-color view of this image here, but from this enhanced image, scientists can determine the size of the cloud droplets.

Cloud droplets form when water vapor condenses onto a small particles, like the ship exhaust. The ship tracks are brighter than the regular clouds because the cloud particles in them are smaller (yellow and peach), but more numerous, than the particles in the natural clouds (lavender to dark purple).

Why are scientists concerned with cloud brightness? A cloud’s brightness impacts how much sunlight gets bounced back to space and how much reaches the surface of the Earth, which influences global climate. The size of the droplets also influences the amount of rain the clouds produce; smaller droplets are less likely to collide and form drops that are big enough to fall as rain.

How’d you do? Check back next week for another WITU Challenge!

Are you ready for another Where In The Universe Challenge? Take a look at the image above and see if you can name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for the image. We’ll provide the image today, but won’t reveal the answer until tomorrow. This gives you a chance to mull over the image and provide your answer/guess in the comment section. Check back tomorrow on this same post to see how you did. Good luck!

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below. Don’t peek before you make your guess!

This is an image of the Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters, taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope. The Pleiades, located more than 400 light-years away in the Taurus constellation, are the subject of many legends and writings. Greek mythology holds that the flock of stars was transformed into celestial doves by Zeus to save them from a pursuant Orion. The 19th-century poet Alfred Lord Tennyson described them as “glittering like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.”

This image from Spitzer highlights the “tangled silver braid.” The spider-web-like network of filaments, colored yellow, green and red in this view, is made up of dust associated with the cloud through which the cluster is traveling. The densest portion of the cloud appears in yellow and red, and the more diffuse outskirts are shown in green hues. One of the parent stars, Atlas, can be seen at the bottom, while six of the sisters are visible at top. Additional stars in the cluster are sprinkled throughout the picture in blue.

How did you do? Come back again next week for another WITU Challenge.

It’s time once again for another Where In The Universe Challenge. Test your visual knowledge of the cosmos by naming where in the Universe this image was taken and give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for this picture. Post your guesses in the comments section, and check back on Thursday at this same post to find the answer. To make this challenge fun for everyone, please don’t include links to the answer in your comments. Good luck!

UPDATE (3/12) The answer has now been posted below. Don’t peek before you make your guess!

Unfortunately these are not multiple Pacmen or fortune cookies, but sand dunes. These dunes, are called “barchan” which means arc-shaped, and they are on Mars. The image was taken by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera. This Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) image shows north polar sand dunes in the summertime. During winter and early spring, north polar dunes are covered with bright frost. When the frost sublimes away, the dunes appear darker than their surroundings. To a geologist, sand has a very specific meaning. A sand grain is defined independently of its composition; it is a particle with a size between 62.5 and 2000 microns. Two thousand microns equals 2 millimeters. The dunes are dark because they are composed of sand grains made of dark minerals and/or rock fragments. Usually, dark grains indicate the presence of unoxidized iron, for example, the dark volcanic rocks of Hawaii, Iceland, and elsewhere. This dune field is located near 71.7°N, 51.3°W. Dune slip faces indicate winds that blow from the upper left toward lower right. This picture covers an area approximately 3 km (1.9 mi) across and is illuminated by sunlight from the lower left.

How did you do this week? Check back again next week for another WITU Challenge!

It’s Wednesday, so that means its time for another Where In The Universe Challenge. Your mission, should you choose to accept is to name where in the Universe this image is from. Give yourself extra points if you can name the spacecraft responsible for this image. Check back on Thursday so find the answer. Good luck!

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below. Don’t peek before you make your guess!

First of all, I owe everyone an apology, because a spacecraft didn’t take this image, it was an Earth-based telescope, the WIYN 3.5 meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, AZ.

Hubble did take an image of the same object (which can be seen here) but its not the image above.

And what is this image? It shows a deep Hydrogen-alpha image of the brightest X-ray source in the sky, NGC 1275.

No one really knows exactly why or how these filaments emanating from the galaxy are produced, but they likely are the result of an interaction between the black hole in the center of the galaxy and the intracluster medium surrounding it. (The glowing background objects in this image are galaxies in that same galaxy cluster.)

At a distance of about 230 million light-years, this is the nearest example to Earth of such vast structures, which are seen surrounding the most massive galaxies throughout the Universe.

Credit for this image: C. Conselice/Caltech and WIYN/NOAO/AURA/NSF

Its a very nifty image, that’s for sure , and yes, the Flying Spaghetti Monster does come to mind when looking at this! A few of you did say NGC 1275, and Jon Hanford actually got everything correct by saying the correct telescope, but I hope the rest of you didn’t get thrown off too much by my asking for the spaceraft– sorry, I got mixed up on which image I ended up using.

Thanks for playing, and check back again next week for another Where In The Universe Challenge.

This week’s WITU Challenge image was sent in by a faithful reader of Universe Today who frequents the comment section as NeoGuru. I’ll not give any hints as to where NeoGuru got the image, or what it is, or whether this image can be found anywhere else on the web (for those of you that like to search online for the image and link the answer!). You’ll have to wait until tomorrow (Thursday) for the answer to be revealed for this week’s Challenge.

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below — don’t peek before you make your guess!

To see a sight like this, you don’t have to look up, but look within…within the Earth, that is. These are glowworms found in the Waitomo Caves in New Zealand. The caves and these creatures look amazing! These worms light up to attract insects for food. They glow from bioluminescence which is a chemical reaction between a chemical they produce called luciferin, and air. The chemical reaction gives off light. Way cool!

Thanks to UT reader NeoGuru for sharing the picture and info for this week’s WITU Challenge. Check back next week to try your hand at a new Challenge.