Milky Way Urban Style

2026-06-26 Shingoo Lee

In a cosmic vista you can never see, the Milky Way arcs through the night above Seoul, South Korea. Remarkably, this urban night skyscape reveals our galaxy's faintly luminous central region and dark obscuring dust clouds in spite of the ...

Anticrepuscular Rays over Sicily

2026-06-25 Marcella Giulia Pace Text: Cecilia Chirenti (NASA GSFC, UMCP, CRESST II)

The Sun has just set... in the opposite side of the sky. Pictured here are anticrepuscular rays apparently converging in the east in this image of the limestone plateau in the heart of the Hyblaean Mountains of southeastern Sicily, in Italy. ...

SDO Observes a Coronal Mass Ejection

2026-06-24

Why does the Sun throw stuff at us? The Sun’s surface is a churning soup of energetic electrons and ions called plasma. The motion of those charged particles creates magnetic field loops that are larger than the Earth. These loops twist, turn, ...

Flying Past Neptune's Moon Triton

2026-06-23

What would it look like to fly past Triton, the largest moon of planet Neptune? Only one spacecraft has ever done this -- and the images of this dramatic encounter have been gathered into a video. In 1989, the Voyager 2 robotic spacecraft shot ...

M27: The Dumbbell Nebula

2026-06-22 Francesco Antonucci

Is this what will become of our Sun? Quite possibly. The first hint of our Sun's future was discovered inadvertently in 1764. At that time, Charles Messier was compiling a list of diffuse objects not to be confused with comets. The 27th ...

Keogram: The Sky in 2025

2026-06-21

What if you could see the entire sky -- all at once -- for an entire year? That, very nearly, is what is pictured here. Every 15 seconds during 2025, an all-sky camera took an image of the sky over the Netherlands. Central columns from these ...

Daytime Moon Meets Evening Star

2026-06-20 Debra Ceravolo

Venus is now appearing on the celestial stage as Earth's brilliant evening star, performing with the Moon, other wandering planets, and bright stars in western skies. For evening sky gazers on June 17, the celestial beacon rose after sunset ...

Starry Night II

2026-06-19 Rodrigo Guerra, Original Painting: Vincent van Gogh

Does this scene look familiar? It is a modern recreation of the famous painting Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. Both the image and the painting depict a tall tree on the left, a crescent moon on the upper right, the planet Venus just to the ...

Possible Supernova Remnant in...

2026-06-18 X-ray: NASA/CXC/UCLA/Z. Zhu et al.; ESA/XMM-Newton; Optical: PanSTARRS; Radio: MeerKAT; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and P. Edmonds Text: Cecilia Chirenti (NASA GSFC, UMCP, CRESST II)

Do you see that blue blob to the lower right of the image center? Astronomers think that it shows where a massive star exploded as a supernova whose light reached Earth 1,700 years ago. The image combines optical data from the PanSTARRS ...

Longmore 8: The Hamster Wheel Nebula

2026-06-17 Mazlin, Parker, Forman, Magill, Hanson Text: Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST II)

How did a hamster wheel get into space? The Hamster Wheel Nebula (Longmore 8) was discovered by Andrew Longmore in 1976 as a part of a larger survey of the southern sky. This survey employed several improvements in photographic technology, ...