So Encaladus is my new favourite moon of Saturn. Sorry, Titan!
I’d never even heard of it before watching Wonders of the Solar System yesterday evening, but now I’m convinced that it’s the best. It’s smaller than Britain, is smooth one side but cratered on the other, and it has long ridges called the tiger stripes which spurt ice out into space, forming one of Saturn’s rings.
If that’s not enough to make it your favourite too, just thing: what other astronomical body could you misspell as a type of Mexican food? (Which is exactly what I did when Googling it just now, despite Wikipedia’s warning.)
An xkcd comic showing the entire observable universe drawn on a logarithmic scale. I laughed at the reference to Ford Prefect, which I’m pretty sure makes me a loser.
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I used to think mere galaxies colliding was impressive, but this is nothing compared to when galaxy clusters hit each other. Boom!
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Jupiter has been in the news recently because of a new red spot which developed on the planet. Being a storm only the size of the Earth or so, it was fairly puny in Jovian terms, and so promptly got swallowed up by the Great Red Spot only a couple of months after first being spotted.
Because of this, The Big Picture has today posted lots of pretty photographs of Jupiter and its moons. The image above is of Io (which is about the size of our moon) orbiting the planet. Jupiter, it’s fair to say, is really quite big.
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