Io from 600,000 kilometers

i-8c3d6f912ec4a2d778ba6a994b38cd1f-480_ioprometheus_galileo.jpg

Courtesy of APOD. More details here.

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a beautiful image. One question. the light seems to be coming from the top of the image. wouldn't it be more appropriate to come from the left or right? I'm assuming that the moon would be lit from the sun.

Call it poetic license by NASA. If you follow the link and click on the image you see a "right-way-up" version.

By John Lynch (not verified) on 11 Feb 2007 #permalink

Keep watching this space for a sulfur-encrusted formerly manned spaceship with the HAL-9000 in control.

I wrote software at JPL for the Galileo that got to, orbited, and plunged into Jupiter, and got some pretty good data from Io. Definitely one of the "must see" places in our Solar System. Then I moved laterally to Mission Planning Engineer on the Voyager fyby of Uranus. Man, I miss being paid for that stuff, back when we had an actual space program, NASA Administrator, and President.

Why does it matter which way the light's coming from? There's no "right way up" in space.