I just saw the moon

[NYC_Frank]

I got to see it last night as well ... not easy to spot that low on the horizon ... I was a little disappointed it wasn't brighter to the naked eye ... still spoiled by Hale Bopp in '97 ... but it did look nice through my 11x80 binoculars...

 

[CrazyDiamond]

I saw NEOWISE last night since I finally got a night with no clouds to the NW. Went to where I work and myself and one of the building engineers went up to the roof (7 story building). NEOWISE was in the NW low sky. Unfortunately I could not get a good shot with my cellphone and binoculars, however, just myself looking through I could see the coma and the tail. I couldn't see the ion tail, just the dust tail. It was still awesome to see.

Next NEOWISE image and description...Would you brave wild animals to photograph this sky? One astrophotographer did -- and we all get to reap the rewards. First, thousands of stars were visible with many of the brightest impressively blue. Next, several red-glowing nebulae were discernible, including the California Nebula on the far right, and, above it, the Heart and Soul nebulae. But the real reason to brave the local wildlife was Comet NEOWISE, visible on the left. In the featured long-duration composite taken last week, Comet NEOWISE's blue-glowing ion tail points straight up, away from the rising Sun, while the Sun-reflecting dust tail trails off toward the right. The picture combines three exposures taken consecutively over 10 minutes from the same location near Miedzygórze, Poland. A moonlit dirt road shows the path ahead, while the Śnieznik Mountains is visible on the horizon. Photo by: Jarek Oszywa

Congratulations to the United Arab Emirates for their successful launch of the Emirates Mars Mission “Hope Probe” which is tasked to provide the first ever complete picture of the Martian atmosphere.

Congratulations to SpaceX, again! A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster has broken a decades-old NASA Space Shuttle reuse record after successfully launching a South Korean military satellite and landing on drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI).

SpaceX also managed to catch both payload fairing (nosecone) halves for the first time ever – an achievement more than three years and a dozen failed attempts in the making.

Known as launch turnaround, the record SpaceX now holds refers to the time it takes for a reusable rocket to launch twice. Prior to today, NASA set that record in 1985 when it launched the same Space Shuttle orbiter (STS Atlantis) twice in 54 days – a truly incredible feat for such a complex vehicle.

As such, Falcon 9 booster B1058 – the rocket that ended nine years without a domestic astronaut launch capability – could scarcely be more deserving as the new world record holder for orbital-class rocket turnaround. Yes you read that right, it's the same booster that just launched the first manned Crew Dragon! The symmetry of that handoff is extraordinarily improbable and made even more impressive by the fact that less than two weeks after B1058 launched Demo-2, NASA appeared to give SpaceX permission to launch future astronauts on flight-proven Dragons and Falcon 9 boosters.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1285328437847052288

One of Hubble's most recent images of Jupiter taken on June 27, 2019.

Super hi-res image from Galileo. The smallest features that can be discerned are 2.5 kilometers in size.

 

[NYC_Frank]

In remembering the 51st anniversary of Apollo 11, heres the landing site from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

 

[Jill NYC]

@NYC_Frank - very cool to see that. Wait, does that mean the moon is flat?

@CrazyDiamond (a.k.a. Professor) on that last picture of Jupiter- does that depict the planet with out much of the atmosphere? I am curious to see what the planet looks like minus all the 500 year storms/etc.

 

[CrazyDiamond]

Thank you @Jill NYC for that and I actually was a Computer/Networking professor for 15 years. IIRC the Jupiter image above from Hubble is a visible light image so whatever is there is what we would see if we were out there, full atmosphere image with nothing stripped away. I think with Jupiter, if there weren't storms and such, it might just be one color because there would be no circulation and the gasses would settle in different layers due to different densities...that's my guess. I do not think that is possible though; as long as there is rotation, there is movement, causing friction, causing heat, which can cause storms/storminess for lack of better terms. I will see if NASA has an image of Jupiter that sort sees through the atmosphere; my guess it will be an infrared, x-ray, or ultraviolet spectrum image.

I forgot to say the immediate image above taken by the Galileo probe is one of the highest resolution pictures of the most volcanic place in our Solar System, Jupter's moon Io.

 

[BabyFacedFinster]

It was exciting. I saw Neo last night also. In fact I woke my kids to come down and see it with our binoculars. We have a lot of trees here, but luckily Neo was visable from one area of our driveway in an open area between 2 trees. I'd like to get a better view tonight and might drive around for an open area.

I also had difficulty with the teloscope. I believe there must be a lower power observation lens that you're supposed to use before switching to the higher power (maybe like a microscope in function) but my telescope only has the one eyepiece and lens and finding Neo is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

It did look cool through the binocs though, tail and all. At first I didn't know what it would look like. I was looking at stars and wondering if they were the comet, but then I found it and it was so obvious even with the naked eye. I've seen pictures, but people told me that you only see the tail with a prolonged camera exposure, not true at all.

 

[CrazyDiamond]

@BabyFacedFinster I believe what you are describing is a sighting scope, a smaller scope (like a rifle scope) that's mounted on the outside of the tube and sighted so that it's center would closely match where the main objective lens would look. If you don't have a rifle scope, what I would try is find NEO with your eyes, squat behind your telescope as low as you can so you are looking up at NEO at the same angle as your telescope. Then put the binoculars on top of the tube and try and wrap your hands so you are holding your binoculars and the telescope at the same time, with your thumbs cradling the underside of the the telescope (that sounded dirty, lol) and your fingers going over the top of the binoculars. As you use the binoculars to sight NEO you will simulatneously be adjusting your telescope to I bet pretty damn close to the main objective lens sighting. I hope that works.

No pics tonight as I got on late...more hopefully tomorrow

 

[Ramahs]

It's been fucking cloudy at night here for days

 

[CrazyDiamond]

NEOWISE's two tails are clearly seen in this best I've found image so far of this awesome comet. The blue ion tail on the left points directly away from the Sun and is pushed out by the flowing and charged solar wind. Structure in the ion tail comes from different rates of expelled blue-glowing ions from the comet's nucleus, as well as the always complex and continually changing structure of our Sun's wind. Most unusual for NEOWISE, though, is the wavy structure of its dust tail. This dust tail is pushed out by sunlight, but curves as heavier dust particles are better able to resist this light pressure and continue along a solar orbit. Comet NEOWISE's impressive dust-tail striations are not fully understood, as yet, but likely related to rotating streams of sun-reflecting grit liberated by ice melting on its 5-kilometer wide nucleus. The featured 40-image conglomerate, digitally enhanced, was captured three days ago through the dark skies of the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia, China by Zixuan Lin.

Although this one is pretty darn good too! By Rogelio in Sierra Nevada, California.

For @Jill NYC...The dark hot spot in this false-color image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft is a window deep into Jupiter's atmosphere. All around it are layers of higher clouds, with colors indicating which layer of the atmosphere the clouds are in. The bluish clouds to the right are in the upper troposphere, or perhaps higher still, in the stratosphere. The reddish gyre under the hot spot to the right and the large reddish plume at its lower left are in the lower troposphere. In addition, a high, gauzy haze covers part of the frame. Jupiter is mostly hydrogen and helium with some ammonia and other elements; in gaseous form on the outside and as you go further towards the center, liquid, and even further, metallic hydrogen. These are the conclsuions so far based on the obseravations and data collected by the various Jupiter probes with the most coming from Juno.

Hubble photographed exquisite details in Jupiter’s atmosphere, as small as about 80 miles (129 kilometers) across. The Great Red Spot and Red Spot Jr are visisble. The Giant Red Spot is anticyclone that has raged for at least 150 years. This famous storm is larger than Earth. However, the Great Red Spot, sadly, is slowly shrinking — a trend seen since the late 1800s. The reason for this phenomenon is still unknown.

 

[GetLeft]

It was exciting.

Yea it's cool, you know it when you see it. My daughter had friends over for a party and when it got dark I went out to watch the comet. They were interested and followed. It wasn't seemless getting them to find it, one by one, but you always knew the moment they saw it. An excited "there it is I see it" was the typical reaction after a few minutes of silence as they searched. Fun stuff.

 

[GetLeft]

Well a couple of nights ago it was cloudy so I didn't notice it was a new moon. Last night we went out to watch and low and behold the moon is back up so the best stretch of viewing the comet might be drawing to an end.

Nice evening with the scope as the comet and Jupiter (we can see four of its moons) are easy to find. And the moon's always great to catch through a telescope. We'll stay out a little later next time to see if we can catech Saturn too.

 

[CrazyDiamond]

NEOWISE in the Spanish Pyrenees by Maxime Daviron

NEOWISE in Germany by Markus Bauer and a bonus meteor as well!

I'm really looking forward to this and the James Webb telescope (holy crap how many damn delays with Webb). When it launches in the mid-2020s, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will create enormous panoramic pictures of space in unprecedented detail. The mission’s wide field of view will enable scientists to conduct sweeping cosmic surveys, yielding a wealth of new information about the universe.
Roman will have the same resolution as the Hubble Space Telescope but capture a field of view nearly 100 times larger. Scientists expect the spacecraft to collect more data than any of NASA’s other astrophysics missions. Roman will gather data about 500 times faster than Hubble, adding up to 20,000 terabytes (20 petabytes) over the course of its five-year primary mission. If this data were printed, the stack of papers would tower 330 miles (530 kilometers) high after a single day. By the end of Roman’s primary mission, the stack would extend well beyond the Moon!

Galaxies abound! In this image, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the stunning silvery-blue spiral arms of the galaxy NGC 4848 are observed in immense detail. Not only do we see the inner section of the spiral arms containing hundreds of thousands of young, bright, blue stars, but Hubble has also captured the extremely faint, wispy tails of the outer spiral arms. Myriad more distant and delightfully diverse galaxies appear in the background. If you are situated in the Northern Hemisphere with a large telescope, you might just be able to observe the ghost-like appearance of this faint galaxy within the faint constellation of Coma Berenices (Berenice’s Hair). Maybe a couple of you that have telescopes can see this.

As beautiful as the surrounding space may be, the sparkling galaxy in the foreground of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope undeniably steals the show. This spotlight-hogging galaxy, seen set against a backdrop of more distant galaxies of all shapes and sizes, is known as PGC 29388. Although it dominates in this image, this galaxy is a small player on the cosmic stage and is known as a dwarf elliptical galaxy. As the “dwarf” moniker suggests, the galaxy is on the smaller side, and boasts a “mere” 100 million to a few billion stars — a very small number indeed when compared to the Milky Way's population of around 250 billion to 400 billion stellar residents!

 

[CrazyDiamond]

In my opinion, galaxies, nebulas, and supernova remnants are some of the most majestic things there are to see. I had shrink a couple of these down to get the image host to accept them; the full size are just amazing to behold...these will suffice.

This Hubble Space Telescope photograph showcases the majestic spiral galaxy UGC 2885, located 232 million light-years away in the northern constellation Perseus. The galaxy is 2.5 times wider than our Milky Way and contains 10 times as many stars. A number of foreground stars in our Milky Way can be seen in the image, identified by their diffraction spikes. The brightest star photobombs the galaxy's disk.

Resembling an opulent diamond tapestry, this image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows a glittering star cluster that contains a collection of some of the brightest stars seen in our Milky Way galaxy. Called Trumpler 14, it is located 8,000 light-years away in the Carina Nebula, a huge star-formation region. Because the cluster is only 500,000 years old, it has one of the highest concentrations of massive, luminous stars in the entire Milky Way. (The small, dark knot left of center is a nodule of gas laced with dust, and seen in silhouette.)

Diamonds are forever, but these blue-white stars are not. They are burning their hydrogen fuel so ferociously they will explode as supernovae in just a few million years. The combination of outflowing stellar "winds" and, ultimately, supernova blast waves will carve out cavities in nearby clouds of gas and dust. These fireworks will kick-start the beginning of a new generation of stars in an ongoing cycle of star birth and death.

I posted an image of the Tarantula Nebula in an earlier post in the infrared spectrum from the Spitzer Space Telescope, this is a different image of it taken from Hubble. The image shows the central region of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The young and dense star cluster R136 can be seen at the lower right of the image. This cluster contains hundreds of young, blue stars, among them the most massive stars detected in the universe so far. Astronomers were able to conduct a detailed imaging and spectroscopic study of the central and most dense region of this cluster. Here they found nine stars with masses greater than 100 times the mass of the sun. The cluster is located 170,000 light-years away from Earth.

Called the Veil Nebula, the debris is one of the best-known supernova remnants, deriving its name from its delicate, draped filamentary structures. The entire nebula is 110 light-years across, covering six full moons on the sky as seen from Earth, and resides about 2,100 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan.

This view is a mosaic of six Hubble pictures of a small area roughly two light-years across, covering only a tiny fraction of the nebula's vast structure.

This close-up look unveils wisps of gas, which are all that remain of what was once a star 20 times more massive than our sun. The fast-moving blast wave from the ancient explosion is plowing into a wall of cool, denser interstellar gas, emitting light. The nebula lies along the edge of a large bubble of low-density gas that was blown into space by the dying star prior to its self-detonation.

The image shows an incredible array of structures and detail from the collision between the blast wave and the gas and dust that make up the cavity wall. The nebula resembles a crumpled bed sheet viewed from the side. The bright regions are where the shock wave is encountering relatively dense material or where the "bed sheet" ripples are viewed edge on.

In this image, red corresponds to the glow of hydrogen, green from sulfur, and blue from oxygen. The bluish features, outlining the cavity wall, appear smooth and arched in comparison to the fluffy green and red structures. The red glow is from cooler gas that was excited by the shock collision at an earlier time and has subsequently diffused into a more chaotic structure. A few thin, crisp-looking, red filaments arise after gas is swept into the shock wave at speeds of nearly 1 million miles an hour, so fast that it could travel from Earth to the moon in 15 minutes.

 

[NYC_Frank]

The "Veil" has always been one of my favs ...

 

[CrazyDiamond]

This is pretty awesome...normally, Steamboat Point looks cool, but not this cool. Every day, the iconic peak of the Bighorn Mountains is an interesting sight, in particular from US Highway 14 in Wyoming. On some rare days, the rocky vertical ridges look even more incredible when seen in front of a distant lightning storm. Earlier this month, though, something even more unusual happened -- the naked-eye Comet NEOWISE rose above it in the middle of the night. Just as a distant lightning storm was occurring in the background. Recognizing a rare opportunity, a determined astrophotographer spent a sleepless night capturing over 1400 images of this unusual triple conjunction. The featured image is among the best of them, with the foreground lit by the Moon off to the right. Photo by Kevin Palmer

With Jupiter opposite the Sun on July 14 and Saturn on July 21, the giant planets are still near their closest to planet Earth in 2020. Sharing the constellation Sagittarius they are up all night, and offer their best and brightest views at the telescope. Both captured on July 22 from a balcony in Paris, (yes you read that right, his balcony!) these two sharp telescopic images don't disappoint, showing off what the giant planets are famous for, Saturn's bright rings and Jupiter's Great Red Spot. These giants of the Solar System are worth following during 2020. On December 21, skygazers can watch the once-in-20-year great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. Photo by Jean-Luc Dauvergne

Looking like a flower, this image of a pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273 was released to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the launch of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

The distorted shape of the larger of the two galaxies shows signs of tidal interactions with the smaller of the two. It is thought that the smaller galaxy has actually passed through the larger one.

A couple shots from what are called the Great Observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory -- have produced a matched trio of images of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy. Each image shows the telescope's different wavelength view of the galactic center region, illustrating the unique science each observatory conducts.

In this spectacular image, observations using infrared light and X-ray light see through the obscuring dust and reveal the intense activity near the galactic core. Note that the center of the galaxy is located within the bright white region to the right of and just below the middle of the image. The entire image width covers about one-half a degree, about the same angular width as the full moon.

Composite of images of the active galaxy Messier 82 from the three Great Observatories: Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and Spitzer Space Telescope. X-ray data recorded by Chandra appears here in blue, infrared light recorded by Spitzer appears in red. Hubble's observation of hydrogen emission appears in orange. Hubble's bluest observation appears in yellow-green.

 

[NYC_Frank]

 

[CrazyDiamond]

Splashdown of Crew Dragon! Awesome job SpaceX, NASA, Doug, Bob, and all the engineers and people who made this happen. This is historical, first private comapny to launch and return humans to space. This is just the beginning folks, I can't wait to see what's next (hop test of starship!).

The Space Dad's are back

Interesting perspective...How different does sunset appear from Mars than from Earth? For comparison, two images of our common star were taken at sunset, one from Earth and one from Mars. These images were scaled to have same angular width and featured here side-by-side. A quick inspection will reveal that the Sun appears slightly smaller from Mars than from Earth. This makes sense since Mars is 50% further from the Sun than Earth. More striking, perhaps, is that the Martian sunset is noticeably bluer near the Sun than the typically orange colors near the setting Sun from Earth. The reason for the blue hues from Mars is not fully understood, but thought to be related to forward scattering properties of Martian dust. The terrestrial sunset was taken in 2012 March from Marseille, France, while the Martian sunset was captured in 2015 by NASA's robotic Curiosity rover from Gale crater on Mars.

In this Hubble Space Telescope image, researchers revisited one of Hubble's most iconic and popular images: the Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation. Here, the pillars are seen in infrared light, which pierces through obscuring dust and gas and unveil a more unfamiliar — but just as amazing — view of the pillars. In this ethereal view the entire frame is peppered with bright stars and baby stars are revealed being formed within the pillars themselves. The ghostly outlines of the pillars seem much more delicate, and are silhouetted against an eerie blue haze.

This one is called Jupiter Abyss. The Juno spacecraft captured this view of an area within a Jovian jet stream showing a vortex that has an intensely dark center. Nearby, other features display bright, high altitude clouds that have puffed up into the sunlight.

 

[CrazyDiamond]

I was watching Science Channel tonight and "The Planets" was on hosted by astronaut Mike Massimino and it was about Jupiter. Lots of stuff from the Juno probe as well as Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini, great show if you haven't seen it.
Jupiter is another one of my favorite things to look at; I know most here in this thread feel the same. We are looking at Jupiter's northern hemisphere tonight...away we go.

This stunning image of Jupiter's stormy northern hemisphere was captured by NASA's Juno spacecraft as it performed a close pass of the gas giant planet. Some bright-white clouds can be seen popping up to high altitudes on the right side of Jupiter's disk.

Dramatic atmospheric features in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere are captured in this view from NASA’s Juno spacecraft. The new perspective shows swirling clouds that surround a circular feature within a jet stream region called "Jet N6."

Intricate swirls in Jupiter’s volatile northern hemisphere are captured in this color-enhanced image from NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Bursts of bright-white “pop-up” clouds appear scattered throughout the scene, with some visibly casting shadows on the neighboring cloud layers beneath them. Juno scientists are using shadows to determine the distances between cloud layers in Jupiter’s atmosphere, which provide clues to their composition and origin.

NASA’s Juno mission captured these elaborate atmospheric jets in Jupiter's northern mid-latitude region. This detailed, color-enhanced image reveals a complex topography in Jupiter’s cloud tops. If you look closely, relatively small, bright, “pop-up” clouds — which rise above the surrounding features — stand out at the tops and edges of the swirling patterns, while the darker areas nearby reveal greater depth.

 

[CrazyDiamond]

Hop test!!! Holy flying beer can, lol.

Do you all know that Hubble is 30 years old? Amazing that it is still providing us with such splendor.

Looking deep into the universe, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope catches a passing glimpse of the numerous arm-like structures that sweep around this barred spiral galaxy, known as NGC 2608. Appearing as a slightly stretched, smaller version of our Milky Way, the peppered blue and red spiral arms are anchored together by the prominent horizontal central bar of the galaxy.

In Hubble photos like this, bright foreground stars in the Milky Way will sometimes appear as pinpoints of light with prominent light flares known as diffraction spikes, an effect of the telescope optics. A star with these features is seen in the lower right corner of the image, and another can be spotted just above the pale center of the galaxy. The majority of the fainter points around NGC 2608, however, lack these features, and upon closer inspection they are revealed to be thousands of distant galaxies. NGC 2608 is just one among an uncountable number of kindred structures.

This image is called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, the photo was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF). The XDF is a small fraction of the angular diameter of the full moon. This image contains about 5,500 galaxies even within its smaller field of view than the original UDF image. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.

This sparkling spiral galaxy looks almost stretched across the sky in this new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Known as NGC 4100, the galaxy boasts a neat spiral structure and swirling arms speckled with the bright blue hue of newly formed stars.

This image displays a swirling spiral galaxy named NGC 2906.
The blue speckles seen scattered across this galaxy are clusters of massive, young stars, which emit hot, blue-tinged radiation as they burn through their fuel at an immense rate. The swaths of orange are a mix of older stars that have swollen and cooled, and low-mass stars that were never especially hot to begin with. Owing to their lower temperatures, these stars emit a cooler, reddish radiation.

 

[NYC_Frank]

Astronomer Jan Koet captured this video in 2007 of Saturn appearing behind the Moon. So cool seeing the movement of planetary bodies through space.

 

[BabyFacedFinster]

Hey folks,
If your sky is clear late this evening, the Perseid meteor shower (in the NE sky) is supposed to be at its peak.

 

[CrazyDiamond]

I'm hoping I can see them tonight...

If humans could travel to this giant planet, we would see a world still glowing from the heat of its formation with a color reminiscent of a dark cherry blossom, a dull magenta.

Using infrared data from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, astronomers discovered this gas giant orbiting a bright star named GJ 504 in 2013. Several times the mass of Jupiter and similar in size, the new world, dubbed GJ 504b, is the lowest-mass planet ever detected around a star like the sun using direct imaging techniques.

GJ 504b is about four times more massive than Jupiter and has an effective temperature of about 460 degrees Fahrenheit (237 Celsius). It orbits the G0-type star GJ 504, which is slightly hotter than the Sun and is faintly visible to the unaided eye in the constellation Virgo. The star lies 57 light-years away and researchers estimate the system is about 160 million years old, based on methods that link the star's color and rotation period to its age.

Many of you may have seen something about this yesterday; here's a more in depth about Ceres. NASA's Dawn spacecraft gave scientists extraordinary close-up views of the dwarf planet Ceres, which lies in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. By the time the mission ended in October 2018, the orbiter had dipped to less than 22 miles (35 kilometers) above the surface, revealing crisp details of the mysterious bright regions Ceres had become known for.

Scientists had figured out that the bright areas were deposits made mostly of sodium carbonate – a compound of sodium, carbon, and oxygen. They likely came from liquid that percolated up to the surface and evaporated, leaving behind a highly reflective salt crust. But what they hadn't yet determined was where that liquid came from.

By analyzing data collected near the end of the mission, Dawn scientists have concluded that the liquid came from a deep reservoir of brine, or salt-enriched water. By studying Ceres' gravity, scientists learned more about the dwarf planet's internal structure and were able to determine that the brine reservoir is about 25 miles (40 kilometers) deep and hundreds of miles wide.

Ceres doesn't benefit from internal heating generated by gravitational interactions with a large planet, as is the case for some of the icy moons of the outer solar system. But the new research, which focuses on Ceres' 57-mile-wide (92-kilometer-wide) Occator Crater – home to the most extensive bright areas – confirms that Ceres is a water-rich world like these other icy bodies.

On Ceres' surface, salts bearing water quickly dehydrate, within hundreds of years. But Dawn's measurements show they still have water, so the fluids must have reached the surface very recently. This is evidence both for the presence of liquid below the region of Occator Crater and ongoing transfer of material from the deep interior to the surface.

The scientists found two main pathways that allow liquids to reach the surface. "For the large deposit at Cerealia Facula, the bulk of the salts were supplied from a slushy area just beneath the surface that was melted by the heat of the impact that formed the crater about 20 million years ago," said Dawn Principal Investigator Carol Raymond. "The impact heat subsided after a few million years; however, the impact also created large fractures that could reach the deep, long-lived reservoir, allowing brine to continue percolating to the surface."
The exposed brine, or salty liquids, in the center of the crater were pushed up from a deep reservoir below Ceres' crust. In this view, they appear reddish.

In the foreground, is Cerealia Facula ("facula" means bright area), a 9-mile-wide (15-kilometer-wide) region with a composition dominated by salts. The central dome, Cerealia Tholus, is about 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) across at its base and 1,100 feet (340 meters) tall. The dome is inside a central depression about 3,000 feet (900 meters) deep.

I tried posting a gif made from a mosaic of images taken by Dawn of the above image, a fly-over; three different hosts and even tried uploading to the media here, none would work.Click the link and it takes you directly to it. https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/PIA24021.gif

 

[NYC_Frank]

Pretty cool little timelapse ....

 

[CrazyDiamond]

^^^Has the appearance like something got zapped and vaporized!

 

[Jill NYC]

@NYC_Frank - reminds me of the old video game Asteroids!