M57: The Ring Nebula
cept for the rings of Saturn, the Ring Nebula (M57) is probably the most famous celestial band. Its classic appearance is understood to be due to our own perspective, though. The recent mapping of the expanding nebula's 3-D structure, based in ...
Flyover of Jupiter's North Pole in...
What would it look like to fly over the North Pole of Jupiter? A fictional animation made from real images and data captured by NASA's Juno spacecraft shows an answer. Since the pole is presently in shadow, the video uses infrared light emitted ...
Space Shuttle Rising
What's that rising from the clouds? The space shuttle. Sometimes, if you look out the window of an airplane at just the right time and place, you see something unusual -- in this case a space shuttle launching to orbit. The featured image of ...
Martian Chiaroscuro
Deep shadows create dramatic contrasts between light and dark in this high-resolution close-up of the martian surface. Recorded on January 24, 2014 by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the scene spans about 1.5 ...
Facing NGC 3344
From our vantage point in the Milky Way Galaxy, we see NGC 3344 face-on. Nearly 40,000 light-years across, the big, beautiful spiral galaxy is located just 20 million light-years away in the constellation of Leo Minor. This multi-color Hubble ...
M22 and the Wanderers
Wandering through the constellation Sagittarius, bright planets Mars and Saturn appeared together in early morning skies over the last weeks. They are captured in this 3 degree wide field-of-view from March 31 in a close celestial triangle with ...
Fortuitous Flash Candidate for the...
Was this flash the farthest star yet seen? An unexpected flash of light noticed fortuitously on Hubble Space Telescope images may prove to be not only an unusual gravitational lensing event but also an image of a normal star 100 times farther ...
Dragon Aurora over Norway
What's that in the sky? An aurora. A large coronal hole opened last month, a few days before this image was taken, throwing a cloud of fast moving electrons, protons, and ions toward the Earth. Some of this cloud impacted our Earth's ...
The Sun Unleashed: Monster Filament...
One of the most spectacular solar sights is an explosive flare. In 2011 June, the Sun unleashed somewhat impressive, medium-sized solar flare as rotation carried active regions of sunpots toward the solar limb. That flare, though, was followed by ...
NGC 6960: The Witch's Broom Nebula
Ten thousand years ago, before the dawn of recorded human history, a new light would have suddenly have appeared in the night sky and faded after a few weeks. Today we know this light was from a supernova, or exploding star, and record the ...
