Science Pictures of the Week: Hubble's triple shadow on Jupiter, focusing on Ceres and light's journey from the Sun

Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team

Saturday, February 7, 2015, 1:52 PM - Among the incredible discoveries that science makes each and every day, it brings to us an amazing array of imagery, from right next door to the ends of the universe.

Here is just a small sample of what we've seen over the past week, starting with Hubble's view of the amazing 'triple shadow' that was cast across the face of Jupiter, the features of the dwarf planet Ceres coming into sharper focus, and the journey of a photon through our solar system, all in a special 'video' edition of SPOTW.

Hubble watches the eclipsing of a giant

Last week, astronomers here on Earth bore witness to a spectacular event, when three moons crossed the face of Jupiter, casting their shadows in a triple eclipse of the planet.

This week, Hubble gave us its view from space, and the images are so incredible, it almost doesn't look real! The four-panel presented above gives two specific views of the event, the top as it was and the bottom with labels, but the time lapse of the event is even more amazing.

According to the ESA's Hubble website: "These new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope images capture a rare occurrence as three of Jupiter’s largest moons parade across the giant gas planet’s banded face. Hubble took a string of images of the event which are stitched together to show the three satellites — Europa, Callisto and Io — in action in this time-lapse video."

Ceres comes into sharper focus

NASA's Dawn spacecraft is creeping up on the dwarf planet Ceres - the largest object in the asteroid belt - and its images just keep getting clearer and sharper. Here's the latest so far:

According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, when these images were taken, on Feb. 4, Dawn was roughly 145,000 kilometres from Ceres, which is less than half the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

Dawn's projected arrival at Ceres is in March, when it will slowly and quietly slip into orbit around the dwarf planet, which is the final stage of its journey. Once there, it will orbit Ceres until the end of its mission.

Fly through the solar system on a beam of light

Light travels at a remarkable speed, passing through 300,000 kilometres of space every second. However, even though it seems like the Earth isn't very far from the Sun, it still takes light leaving its surface a little over 8 minutes to reach us here. This video, produced by designer and animator Alphonse Swineheart, takes us on a journey from the perspective of a solar photon, not looking outward towards its destination, but gazing back along the path from its origin.

For the sake of the entertainment value of the video, Swineheart wrote that he took some liberties with the positions of the planets and asteroids (as they don't often line up in a row like that easily for us) and he left out any kind of space-time distortion effects we'd experience in our view (if we really were riding on the photon at the speed of light). 

The entire video is a full 45 minutes long, which is the real length of time it takes for a photon to reach beyond the orbit of Jupiter. It's still well-worth watching, though, and Swineheart included a convenient ETA timer for each successive flyby, in case the watcher wants to skip forward a bit.

If Swineheart took us on a full journey past all the planets, say out to the New Horizons spacecraft, currently on approach to a flyby of Pluto and Charon, we would be sitting here watching for over 4 hours and 22 minutes! Go further to where Voyager 1 has ventured into interstellar space and it would be a nearly 18-hour marathon!

Space is BIG!

Sources: Hubble, JPL, Alphonse Swinehart/Vimeo.