Seven Dusty Sisters
Is this really the famous Pleiades star cluster? Known for its iconic blue stars, the Pleiades is shown here in infrared light where the surrounding dust outshines the stars. Here, three infrared colors have been mapped into visual colors (R=24, ...
Rocket Eclipse at Sunset
Shockwaves ripple across the glare as a launch eclipses the setting Sun in this exciting close-up. Captured on September 17, the roaring Falcon 9 rocket carried European Galileo L13 navigation satellites to medium Earth orbit after a lift-off ...
Stellar Streams in the Local Universe
The twenty galaxies arrayed in these panels are part of an ambitious astronomical survey of tidal stellar streams. Each panel presents a composite view; a deep, inverted image taken from publicly available imaging surveys of a field that ...
The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules
In 1716, English astronomer Edmond Halley noted, "This is but a little Patch, but it shows itself to the naked Eye, when the Sky is serene and the Moon absent." Of course, M13 is now less modestly recognized as the Great Globular ...
Comet A3 Through an Australian Sunrise
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is now visible in the early morning sky. Diving into the inner Solar System at an odd angle, this large dirty iceberg will pass its closest to the Sun -- between the orbits of Mercury and Venus -- in just two days. Long ...
NGC 6727: The Rampaging Baboon Nebula
This dusty region is forming stars. Part of a sprawling molecular cloud complex that resembles, to some, a rampaging baboon, the region is a relatively close by 500 light-years away toward the constellation Corona Australis. That's about one ...
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS Approaches
What will happen as this already bright comet approaches? Optimistic predictions have Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) briefly becoming easily visible to the unaided eye -- although the future brightness of comets are notoriously hard to ...
Chicagohenge: Equinox in an Aligned City
Chicago, in a way, is like a modern Stonehenge. The way is east to west, and the time is today. Today, and every equinox, the Sun will set exactly to the west, everywhere on Earth. Therefore, today in Chicago, the Sun will set directly down the ...
Sunrise Shadows in the Sky
The defining astronomical moment of this September's equinox is at 12:44 UTC on September 22, when the Sun crosses the celestial equator moving south in its yearly journey through planet Earth's sky. That marks the beginning of fall for ...
A Hazy Harvest Moon
For northern hemisphere dwellers, September's Full Moon was the Harvest Moon. On September 17/18 the sunlit lunar nearside passed into shadow, just grazing Earth's umbra, the planet's dark, central shadow cone, in a partial lunar ...
