3I/ATLAS Flyby
Attention grabbing interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS made its not-so-close flyby of our fair planet on December 19 at a distance of 1.8 astronomical units. That's about 900 light-seconds. Still, this deep exposure captures the comet from another ...
Unicorn, Fox Fur and Christmas Tree
A star forming region cataloged as NGC 2264, this beautiful but complex arrangement of interstellar gas and dust is about 2,700 light-years distant in the faint but fanciful constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn. Seen toward the celestial equator ...
Mystery: Little Red Dots in the Early...
What are these little red dots (LRDs)? Nobody knows. Discovered only last year, hundreds of LRDs have now been found by the James Webb Space Telescope in the early universe. Although extremely faint, LRDs are now frequently identified in deep ...
Red Sprites and Circular Elves...
What's happening in the sky? Lightning. The most commonly seen type of lightning involves flashes of bright white light between clouds. Over the past 50 years, though, other types of upper-atmospheric lightning have been confirmed, ...
Sunset Solstice over Stonehenge
Yesterday the Sun reached its southernmost point in planet Earth's sky. Called a solstice, many cultures mark yesterday's date as a change of seasons -- from autumn to winter in Earth's Northern Hemisphere and from spring to ...
A Solstice Sun Tattoo
The word solstice is from the Latin for Sun and to pause or stand still. And in the days surrounding a solstice the Sun's annual north-south drift in planet Earth's sky does slow down, pause, and then reverse direction. So near the ...
Long Shadows of the Montes Caucasus
When the Moon is at its first quarter phase, the Sun rises along the Montes Caucasus as seen from the lunar surface. The lunar mountain range casts the magnificent, spire-like shadows in this telescopic view from planet Earth, looking along the ...
Jupiter and the Meteors from Gemini
Jupiter, the Solar System's ruling gas giant, is the brightest celestial beacon at the center of this composite night skyscape. The scene was constructed by selecting the 40 exposures containing meteors from about 500 exposures made on the ...
W5: The Soul Nebula
Stars are forming in the Soul of the Queen of Aethopia. More specifically, a large star forming region called the Soul Nebula can be found in the direction of the constellation Cassiopeia, whom Greek mythology credits as the vain wife of a King ...
Andromeda and Sprites over Australia
What’s happening over that tree? Two very different things. On the left is the Andromeda galaxy, an object that is older than humanity and will last billions of years into the future. Andromeda (M31) is similar in size and shape to our own Milky ...
