Full Moonlight

2026-01-03 Jeff Dai

The Full Moon is the brightest lunar phase, and tonight you can stand in the light of the first Full Moon of 2026. In fact, the Moon's full phase occurs on January 3 at 10:03 UTC, while only about 7 hours later planet Earth reaches its 2026 ...

NanoSail-D2

2026-01-02 Ralf Vandebergh

In 2011, on January 20, NASA's NanoSail-D2 unfurled a very thin and very reflective 10 square meter sail becoming the first solar sail spacecraft in low Earth orbit. Often considered the stuff of science fiction, sailing through space was ...

Auroral Corona

2026-01-01 Roi Levi

Cycle 25 solar maximum made 2025 a great year for aurora borealis (or aurora australis) on planet Earth. And the high level of solar activity should extend into 2026. So, while you're celebrating the arrival of the new year, check out this ...

HH-222: The Waterfall Nebula

2025-12-31 Mike Selby

What created the Waterfall Nebula? The origin is still being researched. The structure, officially designated Herbig-Haro 222, appears in the region of NGC 1999 in the Great Orion Molecular Cloud complex. The elongated gaseous stream stretches ...

An Artificial Comet

2025-12-30 Wang Chao

Yes, but can your comet tail do this? No, and what you are seeing is not the tail of a comet. The picture features a cleverly overlayed time-lapse sequence of a group of satellites orbiting Earth together in June. Specifically, these are Starlink ...

M1: The Crab Nebula

2025-12-29 Alan Chen

This is the mess that is left when a star explodes. The Crab Nebula, the result of a supernova seen in 1054 AD, is filled with mysterious filaments. The filaments are not only tremendously complex but appear to have less mass than expelled in ...

NGC 1898: Globular Cluster in the...

2025-12-28

Jewels don't shine this bright -- only stars do. And almost every spot in this jewel-box of an image from the Hubble Space Telescope is a star. Now, some stars are more red than our Sun, and some more blue -- but all of them are much farther ...

Apollo 17's Moonship

2025-12-27

Awkward and angular looking, Apollo 17's lunar module Challenger was designed for flight in the near vacuum of space. Digitally enhanced and reprocessed, this picture taken from Apollo 17's command module America shows ...

3I/ATLAS Flyby

2025-12-26 Dan Bartlett

Attention grabbing interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS made its not-so-close flyby of our fair planet on December 19 at a distance of 1.8 astronomical units. That's about 900 light-seconds. Still, this deep exposure captures the comet from another ...

Unicorn, Fox Fur and Christmas Tree

2025-12-25 Michael Kalika

A star forming region cataloged as NGC 2264, this beautiful but complex arrangement of interstellar gas and dust is about 2,700 light-years distant in the faint but fanciful constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn. Seen toward the celestial equator ...