Dueling Bands over the Atacama Desert
What are these two bands in the sky? The more commonly seen band is on the left and is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun orbits in the disk of this spiral galaxy so that from inside, it appears as a band of comparable brightness ...
Saturn's Iapetus: Painted Moon
What has happened to Saturn's moon Iapetus? Vast sections of this strange world are dark as coal, while others are as bright as snow. To help better understand this unusually tinted moon, in 2007 NASA directed the robotic Cassini ...
Pathfinder on Mars
On July 4th, 1997, using its own array of fireworks, a parachute, and a cocoon of airbags, the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft bounced like a giant beach ball at least 15 times before it came to rest on the surface of Mars at 10:07 AM Pacific Daylight ...
Three Galaxies in Pavo
Some 190 million light-years away, far beyond the bright stars and nebulae of the Milky Way, these three galaxies are drawn together by gravity in a mesmerizing cosmic dance. Clearly distorted by galactic-scale gravitational interactions, large ...
Sibling Supernova Remnants
What happens when one of the stars in a binary goes supernova? This image combines visible (yellow), ultraviolet (purple) and infrared light (cyan, red and orange) to show two supernova remnants and their surrounding environment, about 6,000 ...
The Cotton Candy Clouds of Rho Ophiuchi
Although they look like cotton candy, you cannot eat these clouds! Taken in Cádiz, Spain, today's image features the Rho Ophiuchi complex, a rich tapestry of young and old astronomical phenomena. This colorful cloud complex is a nearby ...
Unusually Smooth Sections of Asteroid...
Why are parts of this asteroid's surface so smooth? The answer seems likely to do with the dynamics of an asteroid that is a loose pile of rubble rather than a solid rock. The unusual asteroid Itokawa was visited by the Japanese spacecraft ...
M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind
Why is the Cigar Galaxy billowing red smoke? M82, as this starburst galaxy is also known, was stirred up by a recent pass near large spiral galaxy M81. This doesn't fully explain the source of the red-glowing outwardly expanding gas and ...
AR 4478: Giant Sunspot Group
Right now, one of the largest sunspot groups in recent history is crossing the Sun. Active Region 4478 is not only big -- it's violent, showing tangled magnetic fields capable of throwing off huge clouds of particles into the Solar System. ...
Mars Marathon by Perseverance
In this recent HiRISE view from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the little green dot indicated on the surface of the big Red Planet is the Perseverance Mars rover. Recorded on June 13, the car-sized, six-wheeled robot was imaged a day before ...
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