Astronomisches Bild des Tages

2016-03-11

This snapshot from deep space captures planet Earth on March 9. The shadow of its large moon is falling on the planet's sunlit hemisphere. Tracking toward the east (left to right) across the ocean-covered world the moon shadow moved quickly in ...

2016-03-10 Babak Tafreshi

A dark Sun hangs in the clearing sky over a volcanic planet in this morning sea and skycape. It was taken during this week's total solar eclipse, a dramatic snapshot from along the narrow path of totality in the dark shadow of a New Moon. Earth's ...

2016-03-09

Why is this galaxy so thin? Many disk galaxies are actually just as thin as NGC 5866, pictured above, but are not seen edge-on from our vantage point. One galaxy that is situated edge-on is our own Milky Way Galaxy. Classified as a lenticular ...

2016-03-08 Progymnasium Rosenfeld

The total solar eclipse of March 8/9 will be the only total eclipse in 2016. Crossing the international date line, the New Moon's dark shadow traces a limited, narrow path for viewing the total phase, making landfall in Indonesia and mostly ...

2016-03-07

What is that changing object in a cold hydrocarbon sea of Titan? Radar images from the robotic Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn have been recording the surface of the cloud-engulfed moon Titan for years. When imaging the flat -- and hence radar ...

2016-03-06

One of the most spectacular solar sights is an erupting prominence. In 2011, NASA's Sun-orbiting Solar Dynamic Observatory spacecraft imaged an impressively large prominence erupting from the surface. The dramatic explosion was captured in ...

2016-03-05

Looking toward the south from an altitude of 400 kilometers, this stunning snapshot from orbit finds bright lights of Tokyo and cities across central and southern Japan, planet Earth shining upward through broken clouds. The spacefaring ...

2016-03-04 CHART32 Team

NGC 134 is probably not the best known spiral galaxy in the constellation Sculptor. Still, the tantalizing island universe is a clearly a telescopic treasure in southern skies. It shares a bright core, clumpy dust lanes, and loosely wrapped ...

2016-03-03 Phillip A Cruden

Some of the Solar System's largest moons rose together on February 23. On that night, a twilight pairing of a waning gibbous Moon and Jupiter was captured in this sharp telescopic field of view. The composite of short and long exposures reveals ...

2016-03-02 Alfred Lee

What's that in the sky? Earlier this month, in the sky high above Hong Kong, China, not just one unusual type of cloud appeared -- but two. In the foreground was a long lenticular cloud, a cloud that forms near mountains from uprising air and ...