Highlights of the Summer Sky

2017-06-05

What's up in the sky this summer? The featured graphic gives a few highlights for Earth's northern hemisphere. Viewed as a clock face centered at the bottom, early summer sky events fan out toward the left, while late summer events are projected ...

Orion: Belt, Flame, and Horsehead

2017-06-04 Rogelio Bernal Andreo

What surrounds the famous belt stars of Orion? A deep exposure shows everything from dark nebula to star clusters, all embedded in an extended patch of gaseous wisps in the greater Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The brightest three stars, ...

Perijove Passage

2017-06-03

On May 19, the Juno spacecraft once again swung by Jupiter in its looping 53 day orbit around the Solar System's ruling gas gaint. Beginning at the top, this vertical 14 frame sequence of enhanced-color JunoCam images follows the spacecraft's ...

Black Holes of Known Mass

2017-06-02

Add GW170104 to the chart of black holes with known mass. The extremely energetic merger of two smaller black holes corresponds to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory's (LIGO) third detection of gravitational waves. The ...

Shadowrise and Sunset

2017-06-01 Göran Strand

The road tracking through this stunning 360 degree view crosses a remote mountain area of Jämtland, Sweden, planet Earth. A 3x8 mosaic of still images, the panorama was taken on May 3rd from a small drone 200 meters above the ground. The scene ...

Approaching the Bubble Nebula

2017-05-31

What would it look like to approach the Bubble Nebula? Blown by the wind and radiation from a massive star, this bubble now spans seven light-years in diameter. The hot star inside is thousands of times more luminous than our Sun, and is now ...

A Kalahari Sky

2017-05-30 Petr Horálek

You wake up in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, Africa. You go outside your tent, set up your camera, and take long exposures of the land and sky. What might you see? Besides a lot of blowing dust and the occasional acacia tree, you might catch ...

Beneath Jupiter

2017-05-29

Jupiter is stranger than we knew. NASA's Juno spacecraft has now completed its sixth swoop past Jupiter as it moves around its highly elliptical orbit. Pictured, Jupiter is seen from below where, surprisingly, the horizontal bands that cover most ...

Collapse in Hebes Chasma on Mars

2017-05-28 ESA

What's happened in Hebes Chasma on Mars? Hebes Chasma is a depression just north of the enormous Valles Marineris canyon. Since the depression is unconnected to other surface features, it is unclear where the internal material went. Inside Hebes ...

Comet Clark is near the Edge

2017-05-27 Raul Villaverde Fraile

Sweeping through this stunning field of view, Comet 71P/Clark really is in the foreground of these cosmic clouds. The 2 panel telescopic mosaic is color enhanced and is about 5 degrees (10 full moons) across. It captures the faint comet's ...