Full Moon Silhouettes

2017-12-03 Mark Gee Music:

Have you ever watched the Moon rise? The slow rise of a nearly full moon over a clear horizon can be an impressive sight. One impressive moonrise was imaged in early 2013 over Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, New Zealand. With detailed ...

Messier Craters in Stereo

2017-12-02

Many bright nebulae and star clusters in planet Earth's sky are associated with the name of astronomer Charles Messier, from his famous 18th century catalog. His name is also given to these two large and remarkable craters on the Moon. Standouts ...

North America and the Pelican

2017-12-01 Paolo Moroni

Fans of our fair planet might recognize the outlines of these cosmic clouds. On the left, bright emission outlined by dark, obscuring dust lanes seems to trace a continental shape, lending the popular name North America Nebula to the emission ...

M33: Triangulum Galaxy

2017-11-30 Peter Nagy

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 ...

M42: The Great Orion Nebula

2017-11-29 Francesco Battistella

Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula's glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud. Many of the filamentary ...

Juno Spots a Complex Storm on Jupiter

2017-11-28

Some storms on Jupiter are quite complex. The swirling storm was captured late last month by the NASA's robotic Juno spacecraft currently orbiting the Solar System's largest planet. The featured image spans about 30,000 kilometers, making this ...

Hurricane Season Animated

2017-11-27

Where do hurricanes go? To better understand dangerous storms, NASA compiled data from several satellites into a supercomputer simulation of this past year's hurricane season. Specifically, the featured video shows how smoke (white), sea salt ...

Our Story in One Minute

2017-11-26 MelodySheepSymphony of Science Music Credit: Our Story

Do you have a minute -- to see the entire backstory of human existence? This thrilling video culls together multiple teasing video snippets in an attempt to succinctly summarize our history. And sets it to music. Briefly depicted, from start to ...

Crossing Horizons

2017-11-25 Jean-Francois Graffand

Follow this vertical panoramic view from horizon to horizon and your gaze will sweep through the zenith of a dark night sky over Pic du Midi mountaintop observatory. To make the journey above a sea of clouds, 19 single exposures were taken near ...

Apollo 17 at Shorty Crater

2017-11-24

In December of 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent about 75 hours on the Moon in the Taurus-Littrow valley, while colleague Ronald Evans orbited overhead. This sharp image was taken by Cernan as he and Schmitt ...