Aurora: The Frog's View

2018-10-06 Mia Stalnacke

What does an aurora look like to a frog? "Awesome!" is the likely answer, suggested by this imaginative snapshot taken on October 3rd from Kiruna, Sweden. Frequented by apparitions of the northern lights, Kiruna is located in Lapland north of the ...

The Last Days of Venus as the Evening...

2018-10-05 Radu-Mihai Anghel

That's not a young crescent Moon poised above the hills along the western horizon at sunset. It's Venus in a crescent phase. About 54 million kilometers away and less than 20 percent illuminated, it was captured by telescope and camera on ...

Opportunity After the Storm

2018-10-04

On Mars dust storms can't actually blow spacecraft over, but they can blot out the Sun. Over three months ago a planet-wide dust storm caused a severe lack of sunlight for the Mars rover Opportunity at its location near the west rim of Endeavor ...

NGC 1898: Globular Cluster in the...

2018-10-03

Jewels don't shine this bright -- only stars do. And almost every spot in this glittering 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 ...

Supernumerary Rainbows over New Jersey

2018-10-02 John Entwistle

Yes, but can your rainbow do this? After the remnants of Hurricane Florence passed over Jersey Shore, New Jersey, USA last month, the Sun came out in one direction but something quite unusual appeared in the opposite direction: a hall of ...

The First Rocket Launch from Cape...

2018-10-01

A new chapter in space flight began in 1950 with the launch of the first rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida: the Bumper V-2. Featured here, the Bumper V-2 was an ambitious two-stage rocket program that topped a V-2 missile base with a WAC ...

The Lonely Neutron Star in Supernova...

2018-09-30

Why is this neutron star off-center? Recently a lone neutron star has been found within the debris left over from an old supernova explosion. The "lonely neutron star" in question is the blue dot at the center of the red nebula near the bottom ...

55 Nights with Saturn

2018-09-29 Tunc Tezel

For 55 consecutive nights Mediterranean skies were at least partly clear this summer, from the 1st of July to the 24th of August 2018. An exposure from each night was incorporated in this composited telephoto and telescopic image to follow bright ...

The Light, the Dark, and the Dusty

2018-09-28 Tasos Liampos

This colorful skyscape spans about two full moons across nebula rich starfields along the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy in the royal northern constellation Cepheus. Near the edge of the region's massive molecular cloud some 2,400 light-years ...

M33: Triangulum Galaxy

2018-09-27 Christoph Kaltseis

The small, northern constellation Triangulum harbors this magnificent face-on spiral galaxy, M33. Its popular names include the Pinwheel Galaxy or just the Triangulum Galaxy. M33 is over 50,000 light-years in diameter, third largest in the Local ...