Other Worlds, Part I

A few more pictures of Walter Myers

The moon. On actual photographs of the lunar landscapes are usually heavilynatoptano in the foreground, and here we can admire the pristine surface.Regolith - lunar soil - has an almost black color, so color photographs of the moon looks like a black and white. A layer of dust may be from a meter to tens of meters - here is one of the "deep" sites. This layer is the result of more than four billion years of bombardment by meteorites and micrometeorites lunar surface.

Sunrise on the bottom of one of the canyons in the province of the Labyrinth of Night Forsida on Mars. The reddish color of the sky gives the diffuse dust in the atmosphere, consisting mainly of "rust" - iron oxides (if the actual photographs taken by the rover to use automatic color correction in photo editor, then the skyon them will be "normal" blue. Stones surface, however, at the same timeacquire a greenish tint that is not true, so right after all the way here). This dustscatters and refracts light partly as a result of the Sun in the sky appears bluehalo.

Sunrise on Mercury. Disk of the sun from Mercury is three times larger thanEarth, and is many times brighter, especially in the airless sky. Given theslowness of the rotation of this planet to do this for several weeks with the same point could be seen slowly creeping over the horizon the solar corona:

The bright object at the top right - our Earth (now on the opposite side of Mercuryfrom the Sun), three stars under it - Akrab, Dshubba and Vrishika - Beta 1, respectively, Delta Pi and the Scorpion.

Volcanic valley on Venus. Venus in size is almost the same as the Earth, andgeologic processes in their interiors should be similar - it concerns includingpresence on Venus of active volcanoes. However, conditions on the surface are completely different - because of the greenhouse temperature is higher than thaton the day side is located closer to the Sun, Mercury - +475 ° C. For some rocks, this temperature exceeds the lower threshold of the red-hot, so it is possible thatsome areas at night here infernal gleam crimson light. The atmosphericpressure at the surface is the same, what on earth is under water at kilometer depth, the main constituent of the atmosphere (96%) - carbon dioxide.

Dawn on Io. Surface, similar to snow in the foreground consists of crystals of sulfur dioxide emitted to the surface of the geysers, like now rising above the close horizon. There is no atmosphere, creating turbulence, so the geyser has the correct form. Here it is closer:

Source of the eruption is still beyond the horizon, and the height of the fountain -more than 300 km. In the foreground - the remains of old lava flows that consist of silicate rock, sulfur and sulfur compounds.

Crescent of Jupiter varies slowly over the horizon of Europe. The eccentricity of its orbit is constantly exposed to disturbances due to the orbital resonance withIo, which is now just goes against the background of Jupiter. The tidaldeformation causes the surface of Europa covered with deep fissures andsatellite provides a warm, stimulating the underground geological processes toremain subsurface ocean of liquid.

Solar eclipse on Callisto. This is the farthest of the four large satellites of Jupiter.It's smaller than Ganymede, but more than Io and Europa. Callisto is alsocovered with ice mixed with rocks, beneath which contains ocean water (the closer to the outer Solar System, the greater the proportion of oxygen in the substance of the planets, and, hence, water), but the tidal interaction betweenthe satellite virtually no torment, so superficial ice thickness can reachstokilometrovoy and volcanism absent, so that the presence of life is unlikely. In this picture we see on Jupiter from a position of about 5 ° from the north pole ofCallisto. Sun will be released soon because of the right edge of Jupiter and itsrays are refracted giant planet's atmosphere. Blue dot on the left of Jupiter - is the Earth, yellowish on the left - Venus, and the right and above it - Mercury.Whitish band behind Jupiter - not the Milky Way, and gas-dust disk in the innerplane of the ecliptic of the solar system, known as Earth observers "zodiacal light". The next picture was taken from the same place after 10 minutes:

Jupiter exactly in the same place - like most other moons in the solar system, Callisto has always turned to one side of the central planet.

In May 2001, "Galileo" has made high-resolution images south-eastern region ofthe ring basin on Callisto's Asgard. In many places in the image were found the strange blonde hills and peaks that rise among the relatively flat and darkersurface. It is believed that they are remnants of the walls of ancient cratersdegraded due to the sublimation of ice. The ice component of the rocks formillions of years to evaporate, and silicate dust and clay slip on the slopes downustilaya surrounding surface. The height of these peaks is twice the Volgograd"motherland." This area is located on the opposite side of Jupiter's satellites.

Water geyser on Enceladus. A small object on the left of Saturn - one of itssatellite Mimas.

Full Neptune in the sky - the only source of light to the night side of Triton. The thin line across the disk of Neptune - this is his ring, seen edge-on, a dark circle- the shadow of the Triton. The opposite edge of depression in middle ground is about 15 miles away. Sunrise on Triton looks less impressive:

The surface is covered with methane ice and nitrogen, the average temperatureof - -235 ° C. Due to the sublimation of the oxide formed thin atmosphere and the surface looks as if melted.

"Summer" on Pluto. Despite its small size and great distance from the Sun, Pluto has an atmosphere at times. This happens when Pluto is moving along itselongated orbit approaches the Sun closer Neptune. During this period,approximately twenty of the methane-nitrogen ice surface it evaporates, shrouding the planet atmosphere, the density of the Martian rival. February 11, 1999 Pluto is once again crossed the orbit of Neptune, and then he once again became the Sun (and now would be the ninth, the farthest from the Sun, the planet, if in 2006 with the adoption of the definition of "planet" was not"demoted") . Now up to 2231 will be a regular goda.on (albeit the largest), frozenKuiper Belt planetoid - a dark, covered in armor of frozen gases, in some placeshas acquired a reddish tinge on the interaction with gamma-rays from outer space.

source: http://haritonoff.livejournal.com/177931.html?page=2&cut_expand=1#cutid1