NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC'S SPACE PICTURES THIS WEEK XXXIII

Space Pictures This Week: Meteor Smoke, Mars Canyon, More
By National Geographic News, 30 October 2012.

1. Grandest Canyon

Grand Canyon, meet your match - and then some. Mars's Valles Marineris (shown in a false-colour composite picture released October 22 by the German Aerospace Centre) is the largest canyon system in the solar system.

Stretching across the equatorial Martian highlands for some 2,485 miles (4,000 kilometres), Valles Marineris yawns 124 miles (200 kilometres) wide and up to 6.8 miles (11 kilometres) deep. Earth's 1.25-mile-deep (2-kilometre-deep) Grand Canyon could easily fit into one of Valles Marineris's smaller side valleys.

Another measure of the Martian canyon's magnitude: It took 20 images from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) aboard ESA's Mars Express spacecraft to represent Valles Marineris in glorious false colour (as pictured above).

2. Bloom of Youth

What NASA calls a "beautiful young crater" sits within the moon's complex crater Icarus in a picture released October 23 by the team behind the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Freshly kicked up by the impact that created the crater, subsurface material shines bright against long-exposed rocks. But the bright, dandelion-like blast site should fade to match the surrounding ground relatively soon, by lunar standards - within hundreds of millions of years.

3. Full of Stars

Star stalker Louie Atalasidis captured a stellar feature of the constellation Orion the Hunter from Bankstown, Australia - the Orion Nebula, a star-forming cloud of gas and dust.

The nebula - seen in a picture Atalasidis shared with National Geographic's My Shot photography community on October 26 - is about 1,500 light-years away. Even so, the space cloud can be seen with the naked eye under dark skies as part of the "sword" hanging from Orion's belt in the iconic constellation. (Get Orion Nebula wallpaper.)

4. Smoke on the Water, Fire in the Sky

Seen in several photos taken over a half hour, smoke from an Orionid fireball squiggles across the sky over a pond in northern Maine on October 19.

The Orionid meteor shower is caused when Earth slams into a debris field left behind by Halley's comet, which won't return to our neck of the woods for another five decades. (Find out why Halley's comet has been seen as an omen of doom.)

5. Magnetic Appeal

Art and science melt and merge in a new picture of the sun created October 19 at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland. Scientists used a gradient filter - often used by photo editors to create dramatic effects.

By boosting contrast in the image, the gradient filter better reveals coronal loops, arcs of solar material whose paths are determined by magnetic fields in the sun's atmosphere. Studying those field lines, according to Goddard, "can help researchers understand what's happening with the sun's complex magnetic fields, fields that can also power great eruptions on the sun, such as solar flares or coronal mass ejections."

6. Starry Night

Stars seem to pinwheel above a stone house in the Himalayan region of Garhwal, India, on October 20. Shared with National Geographic's My Shot photography community the next day, the image was captured with the light of the full moon - and a very long exposure.

(Find out how a professional National Geographic photographer captures the night sky.)

[Source: National Geographic News. Edited.]