Jupiter's Moon Amalthea
3.11.1995

Amalthea is Jupiter's fifth largest moon, much smaller than the four Galilean satellites Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. The orbit of Amalthea is inside of these moons, and with its long axis always pointing toward Jupiter. It's dark surface color is probably due to sulfur being expelled from Io.

Callisto: Dark Smashed Iceball
6.09.1995

Callisto is a dirty battered world, showing the most beaten surface of Jupiter's major moons. Made of a rocky core covered by fractured ice, Callisto's past collisions with large meteors are evident as large craters surrounded by concentric rings.

Saturn's Cleanest Moon: Enceladus
25.11.1995

Enceladus orbits Saturn between the smaller Mimas and the larger Tethys. Enceladus is composed mostly of water ice and has the cleanest and purest ice surface in the Solar System. It's surface therefore appears nearly white. The surface also has many unusual groves and relatively few craters, like Jupiter's moon Ganymede.

Occultations and Rising Moons
13.05.1998

On April 23, the rising crescent Moon occulted (passed in front of) Venus and Jupiter. The double occultation was a rare event and only visible from certain locations tracing a path across Earth's surface. This dramatic telephoto picture was taken at one such location, Ascension Island in the South Atlantic.

Uranus' Moon Miranda
24.12.1995

NASA's robot spacecraft Voyager 2 passed the planet Uranus and its moons in 1986. While the cloud tops of Uranus proved to be rather featureless, the surface of Miranda, the innermost of Uranus' large moons, showed several interesting features.

A Triple Eclipse on Jupiter
2.02.1998

Part of Jupiter is missing. Actually, three parts appear to be missing. In reality though, the three dark spots seen in the above photograph are only shadows. The unusual alignment of three of Jupiter's moons between the Jovian giant and the Sun was imaged last November 10th.

Callisto Enhanced
12.05.1998

Callisto is half rock and half ice. This moon of Jupiter is approximately the size of the planet Mercury, making it the third largest moon in the Solar System, after Ganymede and Titan. Callisto...

Erupting Volcanoes on Io
5.08.1996

Jupiter's moon Io has active volcanoes. The Voyager spacecraft caught several erupting when they passed the energetic moon in 1979. In the above picture, several of Io's volcanoes are visible and one is seen actually erupting.

Jupiters Moons Thebe, Amalthea, and Metis
8.05.2000

The robot spacecraft Galileo in orbit around Jupiter has recently photographed the inner moons of Jupiter in greater detail than ever before. These pictures of Thebe, Amalthea, and Metis are shown to scale, and reveal details as small as three kilometers across. Amalthea, by contrast, has a total length of about 200 kilometers.

Shadows Across Jupiter
15.02.2013

Two dark shadows loom across the banded and mottled cloud tops of Jupiter in this sharp telescopic view. In fact, captured on January 3rd, about a month after the ruling gas giant appeared at opposition in planet Earth's sky, the scene includes the shadow casters.