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I have been looking for images of the planets and have found pretty decent ones of Earth and Venus from NASA.

enter image description here

That detail is opposed to this one of Uranus:

enter image description here

And these of Mars, (and this and this)

enter image description here

I am disappointed in the quality of the public domain images from NASA I have found for these planets:

  • Mars
  • Jupiter
  • Saturn
  • Uranus
  • Neptune
  • Pluto
  • Earth's Moon

I am happy with the ones found for:

  • Mercury
  • Venus
  • Earth

They seem to be high quality in terms of detail and pixel size (in the MBs).

Wondering if one could explain how I go about finding these public domain planet images from NASA (or elsewhere, but I imagine they are all from the Hubble telescope, I don't know too much) that are high quality in terms of detail and pixels/size. If nothing else it would be helpful to simply link to them if there is no pattern to where they are located.

If there is a pattern to where the high quality images are located, I would be interested too to find ones of comets/asteroids/stars. I have found many high quality images of galaxies which is neat, but not of the planets yet.

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  • $\begingroup$ NASA does provide very large rectangular images that can be mapped to spherical surfaces. I am not sure where the site is, I may try to find it later today, but it should be pretty popular. You can also check these: Universe Today, Phys.org, Mike Brown's site $\endgroup$
    – uhoh
    Jun 3 '19 at 1:58
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The best NASA images of planets are not from the Hubble Space Telescope; they are from the spacecraft that flew by or went into orbit around them. For Uranus and Neptune, this means Voyager 2; for Pluto, this means New Horizons. For Jupiter, this means primarily Voyagers 1 and 2, and especially Galileo and Juno; for Saturn, Voyagers 1 and 2 and (especially) Cassini.

If you google for "[planet-name] planet gallery", you should get some pretty good images that way; also try adding the name of a relevant spacecraft (if you're stuck, check the Wikipedia page for each planet to learn which spacecraft visited them). A few NASA web pages:

and so forth. (Note that Uranus, even when seen by Voyager 2, is pretty featureless and boring, at least at visible wavelengths.)

You might also try searching at the Astronomy Picture of the Day site. (Not all of those are necessarily public domain, thoug.)

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