New, still hot set of amazing photos from the greatest space photographer ever - Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn.

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/10/saturn_at_equinox.h tml

Totally inspiring.

Hello, Maciej,

thank's a lot for calling attention for these breathtakting pictures!

Beautiful! Thanks for sharing the link

It's amazing how these pictures can be taken but we cant get a clear shot (if any shot that is)  from the recent moon impact.

Unbelievable

Yeah, but you know, Cassini probe takes photos of big objects, not so small as the impact site of moon (because it's relatively small). Anyway, I am sure that we'll have good pictures of impact, we just need to wait a bit for them.

So cool. Thanks for the post 

Voyager wrote: Yeah, but you know, Cassini probe takes photos of big objects, not so small as the impact site of moon (because it's relatively small). Anyway, I am sure that we'll have good pictures of impact, we just need to wait a bit for them.

 

maybe I am looking at this the wrong way but the Moon is soooo close and up until now...nothing. From what I have seen so far it all looks really bad.

In my opinion NASA has not done enough. Hell I still think we are way behind in general.

Sorry for going off topic .

I think it's not an offtop, we're discussing the space photography

Anyway, I think you should also know that the main purpose of this "impact" experiment is to analyze the dust raised after the impact and uncover the potential water ice under the surface - everything is analyzed by instruments that doesn't require any photos taken in visible light. So, there is no reason to use orbiters like LRO with high res cameras to take photos, because right now their doing their jobs somewhere else. LCROSS wasn't designed for photography, it's main visible light camera resolution is only 720 x 486 pixels. Hi-res cameras for space probes are not only expensive - they also consume large amounts of power. And I think it's always better to design two specialized probes instead of one multifunctional.

I think you are missing my point.

I am saying that the Hubble telecope, Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and astronomers down here on earth still did not have a decent Photo of anything. If the Hubble was pointed at it like they said it was then we should have great, clear Pictures.

Not grainy pics like the one's of people taking a picture of a UFO or the Loch Ness Monster

I think I get your point.

Hubble can't take pictures of close objects like Moon. And it would be rather difficult to point HST and synchronize everything to make that possible.

And there is also other difficulties of taking pictures - most cameras requires long exposure times, taking photos of such short-time events like the impact with required 30 sec exposure (i.e.) results with a blurry image, where nothing is visible.

BTW, here is a photo of a crash site taken after the impact http://blogs.sciencemag.org/newsblog/lcross_impact.jpg