Wednesday, July 8, 2009

approaching jupiter

this excellent animation was created by adding images taken by one of the voyager space crafts, as it approached the planet jupiter in 1979!


notice how the gas from different horizontal layers moves in *different* directions creating amazing vortices in the atmosphere!! the 66 images used to create this animation were some of the first close-up shots humans collected of jupiter!

the voyager space crafts continue to travel away from the earth and beyond our solar system! as of may 2009, voyager 1 had traveled 16.4 billion kilometers (110 astronomical units) from the sun. 1 astronomical unit is the distance between the earth and the sun, so this little chunk of synthetic machinery is 110 times farther from the sun than we are, and it is escaping the solar system at a speed of about 3.6 astronomical units per year!

voyager 1 remains the most distant human-made object in space!

5 comments:

Viewtiful_Justin said...

It's amazingly beautiful! I want to look at it all day.

Nikky said...

this image is quite hypnotic!

Aeryn said...

Wow, it looks truly amazing!!! It makes me so sad that we are not focusing more of our resources on space exploration instead of the many stupid things money and resources are being squandered on worldwide...

Billy said...

Wow! That is so beautiful!!

Big Mark 243 said...

How fast would something have to be moving and how long would it take that object to overtake Voyager?