Category: Where In the Universe?

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. Check back sometime on Thursday to find the answer and see how you did (and yes, I’ll try to remember to post the answer in a timely fashion this week!)

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below.

Pretty much everyone said this was Europa, and guess what, you’re right! This highly detailed image of Jupiter’s moon Europa was taken by the Galileo spacecraft. It’s a processed image to show the differences in materials that cover the ice. The red linear features are cracks and ridges that stretch for thousands of kilometres across the moon’s surface, resulting from tides raised by the pull of Jupiter. The mottled red terrain shows areas that have been disrupted and where ice blocks have moved around. The red material is thought to be a non-ice contaminant, such as salts brought up from the ocean thought to lie beneath Europa’s icy shell. Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

Great job everyone, and check back again 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 (2/14) The answer has now been posted below!

Did you recognize this intriguing globular cluster of stars? Just kidding! — it’s actually the constellation of city lights surrounding London, England, here on planet Earth, as recorded with a digital camera by astronaut Don Pettit from the International Space Station. Taken in February 2003, north is toward the top and slightly left in this nighttime view. The encircling “London Orbital” highway by-pass, the M25 , is easiest to pick out south of the city. Even farther south are the lights of Gatwick airport and just inside the western (left hand) stretch of the Orbital is Heathrow. The darkened Thames river estuary fans out to the city’s east. In particular, two small “dark nebulae” – Hyde Park and Regents Park – stand out slightly west of the densely packed lights at the city’s core.

The crew of the International Space Station acquired this image shortly after 7:22 p.m. local time on the evening of February 4, 2003. Either thin, low clouds or perhaps fog is evident in the fuzzy character of patterns for some of the surrounding smaller cities while that of the warmer urban center is still clear and sharp.

For more info on this image see here and here.

Check back next week for another WITU Challenge (and sorry for the delay in posting the answer this week!)

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 to this Challenge has now been posted below. Don’t peek at the answer until you make a guess!

This image is of oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico on Earth. No, its not from an oil spill, but from natural seepage coming from the ocean floor. Natural seepage can introduces a significant amount of oil to ocean environments. Usually oil slicks on the ocean are difficult to see in natural-color (photo-like) satellite images, since the ocean surface is already so dark blue, the additional darkening or slight color change that results from a spill is usually imperceptible.

But remote-sensing scientists recently demonstrated that these “invisible” oil slicks do show up in photo-like images if you look in the right place, and if the sun is just at the right angle. The image above is a cropped version of the larger image below, showing the Gulf of Mexico, taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite on May 13, 2006.

For more info on these images, see NASA’s Earth Observatory website

How did you do in this week’s Challenge?

It’s Wednesday, so that means its time for another “Where In The Universe” challenge to test your visual knowledge of the cosmos. This is number 40! Woo hoo! 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. Check back sometime on Thursday to find the answer and see how you did.

UPDATE: The answer has now been posted below. No peeking before you make your guess!

This is Mercury, taken by MESSENGER in October 2008 as the spacecraft approached the planet during the mission’s second Mercury flyby. This image shows nightfall on Mercury. It was taken by the Narrow Angle Camera, showing an area about 420 kilometers (260 miles) wide. The spacecraft altitude was 15,900 kilometers (9,900 miles). For more information about this image check out the MESSENGER website.

Thanks for taking part in this week’s WITU Challenge. Check back next week for more!

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.

The prize for the best answer this week goes to Steve who said “The Lights of Zetar” from Star Trek. (The only Star Trek episode where Scotty got the girl.) Thanks for making me laugh out loud, Steve! However, most everyone else had the correct answer, or close to correct anyway: This is a Chandra image of the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, Sagittarius A, aka Sgr A*. The image was produced by combining a dozen Chandra observations made of a 130 light year region in the center of the Milky Way. The colors represent low (red), medium (green) and high (blue) energy X-rays. For more information about this image, check out this page on the Chandra website.

Great job, everyone, and stay tuned for next week’s WITU Challenge.

Are you up 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’re up to the challenge! Check back tomorrow on this same post to see how you did. Good luck!

UPDATE: (1/15) The answer has been posted below. No peeking before you make your guess!

As many of you guessed (knew), these are radar images taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn’s moon Titan. The image shows dunes 330 feet (100 meters) high that run parallel to each other for hundreds of miles at Titan’s equator. One dune field runs more than 930 miles (1500 km) long.

The images look just like radar images of deserts in Africa, as seen below, showing that similar wind-driven processes might be taking place on Titan:

Great job, everyone. Come back again next week for another WITU Challenge!

This week’s Where In The Universe Challenge has a new twist. This image was actually submitted by one of our readers, Wienie van der Oord from Israel. Its quite an interesting image, don’t you agree?! I’ll not give any hints as to where Wienie 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. My only hope is that some conspiracy theorist types don’t see this and claim this image is proof of life on an alien world. Or, possibly, could it really be…..?!

Check back tomorrow to find out! It will be interesting to see the guesses on this one, so submit ’em in the comment section.

UPDATE (1/8): The answer has now been posted below. No peeking before you make your guess!

This image was certainly a lot of fun, and it’s one you can’t find anywhere else on the internet. It was sent in by UT reader Wienie van der Oord, and I’ll let her explain what it is:

“After a short rainfall in the Arava desert in Israel, a tiny desert plant developed a root and two leaves and looked like an “alien” running over another planet,” she said. The raindrops formed the “craters” in the desert sand, and the root going down into the ground suspended the seed above ground, making it look like this little bunny-like creature was scooting across an alien world. The plant in question that has just sprouted is the Zygophyllum Dumosum, a shrub native to Israel that can be found in the Judean desert and Dead Sea Valley, the Negev Hills and Arava Valley. Wienie sent another image too, after she scooped up the little “alien” and put it in her hand:

If you’re partial to plants, here’s a Wildflower of Israel website where you can find out more about this shrub.

Thanks to Wienie for sharing this very “cute” image. If you have an original photograph you’d like to submit or a suggested image for a Where In The Universe Challenge, you can send them to me. To find my email address you have to visit my personal website, nancyatkinson.com . Sorry, I’m not going to be spammed to death by posting my email address!

We’ll squeeze in one more WITU Challenge for 2008! 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, and Happy New Year!

UPDATE (1/1/09): The answer has now been posted below. If you haven’t made your guess yet, no peeking before you do!!

This beautiful image shows the setting sun glinting off the Amazon River and numerous lakes in its floodplain, taken by an astronaut on board the ISS in August 19, 2008. About 150 kilometers of the sinuous Amazon is shown here; the area is about 1,000 kilometers inland from the Atlantic Ocean. A member of Expedtion 17 took the image with a Nikon D2Xs digital camera fitted with a 400 mm lens. This image is part of the ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment. The original image can be seen at NASA’s Earth Observatory website.

I really will provide the answer and a link to the original picture when it is time. There’s really no need to provide links to the answer in the comments.

Happy New Year, and check back again next week for another Where In The Universe 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, drink some eggnog, 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 and enjoy the holidays!

UPDATE (12/25): The answer has now been posted below. If you haven’t made your guess yet, no peeking before you do!!

In this holiday edition of Where In The Universe, newborn stars, hidden behind thick dust in visible light, are revealed in infrared in this image of a part of the Christmas Tree Cluster from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Two instruments created this image, Spitzer’s Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) and Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS) instruments.

Astronomers nicknamed this the “Snowflake Cluster,” the stars appear to have formed in regularly spaced intervals along linear structures in a configuration that resembles the pattern of a snowflake.

More info on this image.

Best wishes for the merriest of whatever holiday you may celebrate.

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, dress up for dinner, and have fun.

UPDATE (12/18): The answer has now been posted below. If you haven’t made your guess yet, no peeking before you do!!

Nice job this week, everyone (although I think my favorite answer was a wrong one by “Carl Sagan.”) This is Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (named after its co-discoverers), which is often referred to as the “string of pearls” comet. It is famous because it collided with the planet Jupiter: the comet’s original single nucleus was torn to pieces by Jupiter’s strong gravity. The pieces are seen in this composite of Hubble Space Telescope images to be “pearls” strung out along the comet’s orbital path. This image was taken in 1992, and in July of 1994 these pieces collided with Jupiter in a rare and spectacular series of events.

I’ll try to find a harder one next week, but …. I might be lenient since it will be close to the holidays!