Rainbow Airglow over the Azores
Why would the sky glow like a giant repeating rainbow? Airglow. Now, air glows all of the time, but it is usually hard to see. A disturbance however -- like an approaching storm -- may cause noticeable rippling in the Earth's atmosphere. ...
Veil Nebula: Wisps of an Ancient...
Wisps like this are all that remain visible of a Milky Way star. About 7,000 years ago that star exploded in a supernova, leaving the Veil Nebula. At the time, the expanding cloud was likely as bright as a crescent Moon, remaining visible for ...
UGC 1810: Wildly Interacting Galaxy...
What's happening to this spiral galaxy? Although details remain uncertain, it surely has to do with an ongoing battle with its smaller galactic neighbor. The featured galaxy is labelled UGC 1810 by itself, but together with its collisional ...
Afterimage Sunset
On May 7, the Sun setting behind a church bell tower was captured in this filtered and manipulated digital skyscape from Ragusa, Sicily, planet Earth. In this version of the image the colors look bizarre. Still, an intriguing optical illusion ...
Mars in the Loop
This composite of images spaced a weather-permitting 5 to 9 days apart, from 2024 September 19 (top right) through 2025 May 18 (bottom left), faithfully traces ruddy-colored Mars as it makes a clockwise loop through the constellations Gemini and ...
Irregular Dwarf Galaxy Sextans A
Grand spiral galaxies often seem to get all the attention, flaunting young, bright, blue star clusters and pinkish star forming regions along graceful, symmetric spiral arms. But small galaxies form stars too, like irregular dwarf galaxy Sextans ...
Herbig-Haro 24
This might look like a double-bladed lightsaber, but these two cosmic jets actually beam outward from a newborn star in a galaxy near you. Constructed from Hubble Space Telescope image data, the stunning scene spans about half a light-year across ...
Zeta and Rho Ophiuchi with Milky Way
Behold one of the most photogenic regions of the night sky, captured impressively. Featured, the band of our Milky Way Galaxy runs diagonally along the bottom-left corner, while the colorful Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex is visible just right of ...
Spiral Galaxy NGC 2566 from Webb
What’s happening in the center of spiral galaxy NGC 2566? First, the eight rays that appear to be coming out of the center in the featured infrared image are not real — they are diffraction spikes caused by the mechanical structure of the Webb ...
Beneath Jupiter
Jupiter is stranger than we knew. NASA's Juno spacecraft has now completed over 70 swoops past Jupiter as it moves around its highly elliptical orbit. Pictured from 2017, Jupiter is seen from below where, surprisingly, the horizontal bands ...
