Astronomisches Bild des Tages

2026-04-03 Carl Knox

How can we see what is invisible? Black holes are not easy to see in the dark cosmic night, but astronomers can find them by analyzing their gravitational effects on matter, light and spacetime. The featured image shows an illustration that ...

2026-04-02 NASA/Bill Ingalls; Text: Ogetay Kayali (MTU)

We are one small step closer to returning to the Moon. A new chapter in human exploration began yesterday when NASA's Artemis II launched aboard the Space Launch System (SLS) from Kennedy Space Center. Carrying four astronauts, the Orion ...

2026-04-01 Richard Whitehead Text: Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST II)

What unexpected things do you see when you look up at the night sky? Today’s image resembles an abstract painting, with large swaths of color strewn across a cosmic canvas seemingly without design. Despite the image's abstract nature, the ...

2026-03-31

Titania's tortured terrain is a mix of canyons, cliffs, and craters. NASA's interplanetary robot spacecraft Voyager 2 passed the largest moon of Uranus in 1986 and took the feature picture. That the trenches of Titania resemble those ...

2026-03-30 SADR Observatory Team: J-C Dalouzy, P. Bazart, M. Dherbécourt, C. Humbert, G. Leroy, J-P Quéau, H. Talbot, & E. Valin

What's happened to the center of this galaxy? Dramatic dust lanes run across the center of unusual elliptical galaxy Centaurus A. These dust lanes are so thick they almost completely obscure the galaxy's center in visible light. This ...

2026-03-29

What are these Earthlings trying to tell us? The featured message was broadcast from Earth towards the globular star cluster M13 in 1974. During the dedication of an upgrade to the Arecibo Observatory - then the largest single radio telescope ...

2026-03-28

Robert H. Goddard, considered the father of modern rocketry, was born in Worcester Massachusetts in 1882. As a 16 year old, Goddard read H.G. Wells' science fiction classic "War Of The Worlds" and dreamed of space flight. By 1926 ...

2026-03-27 Peter Kennett

Scanning the skies for galaxies, Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson and colleagues identified some 100 compact groups of galaxies, now appropriately called Hickson Compact Groups. The four prominent galaxies seen in this intriguing telescopic ...

2026-03-26

What is the sound of two black holes merging in deep space? Sound waves don't propagate in vacuum, but gravitational waves do. In 2015 we were able to "hear" them for the first time and confirm one of Albert Einstein's ...

2026-03-25 Rositsa Dimitrova Text: Keighley Rockcliffe (NASA GSFC, UMBC CSST, CRESST II)

In the words of today's astrophotographer, Rositsa Dimitrova, "What have these silent sentinels watched pass across the sky?" The volcanic mo'ai (meaning statue) of Ahu Tongariki stand guard over Rapa Nui (Isla de Pascua, ...