A Northern Summer's Night

2018-07-07

Near a summer's midnight a mist haunts the river bank in this dreamlike skyscape taken on July 3rd from northern Denmark. Reddened light from the Sun a little below the horizon gives an eerie tint to low hanging clouds. Formed near the edge of ...

Charon: Moon of Pluto

2018-07-06

A darkened and mysterious north polar region known to some as Mordor Macula caps this premier high-resolution view. The portrait of Charon, Pluto's largest moon, was captured by New Horizons near the spacecraft's closest approach on July 14, ...

Shadow Rise on the Inside Passage

2018-07-05 Steve Cullen

At sunset look east not west. As Earth's dark shadow rises from the eastern horizon, faint and subtle colors will appear opposite the setting Sun. This beautiful evening sea and skyscape records the reflective scene from a cruise on the ...

Dawn's Early Light, Rocket's Red Glare

2018-07-04 Michael Seeley

If you saw the dawn's early light from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station last Friday, June 29, then you could have seen this rocket's red glare. The single 277-second long exposure, made from the roof of NASA's Vehicle Assembly building, shows a ...

An Airplane in Front of the Moon

2018-07-03 Ji-Hoon Kim

If you look closely at the Moon, you will see a large airplane in front of it. Well, not always. OK, hardly ever. Actually, to capture an image like this takes precise timing, an exposure fast enough to freeze the airplane and not overexpose ...

From the Galactic Plane through Antares

2018-07-02

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 far left, while the colorful Rho Ophiuchus region including the bright orange star Antares is ...

Fresh Tiger Stripes on Saturn's...

2018-07-01

Do underground oceans vent through the tiger stripes on Saturn's moon Enceladus? Long features dubbed tiger stripes are known to be spewing ice from the moon's icy interior into space, creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon's South ...

The East 96th Street Moon

2018-06-30 Stan Honda

A very full Moon rose over Manhattan's Upper Eastside on June 28, known to some as the Strawberry Moon. Near the horizon, the warm yellow lunar disk was a bit ruffled and dimmed by a long sight-line through dense, hazy atmosphere. Still it fit ...

Messier 24: Sagittarius Star Cloud

2018-06-29 Roberto Colombari

Unlike most entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog of deep sky objects, M24 is not a bright galaxy, star cluster, or nebula. It's a gap in nearby, obscuring intertellar dust clouds that allows a view of the distant stars in the Sagittarius ...

Sigma Octantis and Friends

2018-06-28 Frank Sackenheim

South pole star Sigma Octantis (of the constellation Octans) is on the left of this starry expanse spanning over 40 degrees across far southern skies. You'll have to look hard to find it, though. The southern hemisphere's faint counterpart to the ...