The Faces of Mars

2010-05-05

husiastic astro-artists ranging from expert to beginner, the youngest age 10, all contributed their work to this entertaining panel featuring different faces of Mars. Their sketches are all based on telescopic views of the Red Planet from earlier ...

A Hall of Mountain Fogbows

2010-05-04 A. Tudorica

If you tried to enter this hall of fog, you would find it dissipates around you. The hall is actually an optical illusion created by sunlight backscattering off of a cloud passing below the peak of the mountain from which this picture was taken. ...

Spiral Galaxy NGC 3190 Almost Sideways

2010-05-03

Some spiral galaxies are seen almost sideways. NGC 3190, one such galaxy, is the largest member of the Hickson 44 Group, one of the nearer groups of galaxies to our own Local Group of galaxies. Pictured above, finely textured dust lanes surround ...

The Coma Cluster of Galaxies

2010-05-02 Dean Rowe

Almost every object in the above photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured above is one of the densest clusters known - it contains thousands of galaxies. Each of these galaxies houses billions of stars - just as our own ...

A Pulsar's Hand

2010-05-01

As far as pulsars go, PSR B1509-58 appears young. Light from the supernova explosion that gave birth to it would have first reached Earth some 1,700 years ago. The magnetized, 20 kilometer-diameter neutron star spins 7 times per second, a cosmic ...

Mars in a Manger

2010-04-30 John Ambrose

At opposition in late January, Mars shone very brightly in planet Earth's night sky, among the stars of the constellation Cancer the Crab. Since then the Red Planet has been fading, but still lingers in Cancer during April and May. In mid-April, ...

Virgo Cluster Galaxy NGC 4731

2010-04-29 Stephen Leshin

Barred spiral galaxy NGC 4731 lies some 65 million light-years away. The lovely island universe resides in the large Virgo cluster of galaxies. Colors in this well-composed, cosmic portrait, highlight plentiful, young, bluish star clusters along ...

Sunset on a Golden Sea

2010-04-28 Digital-Astronomy

On April 17, the sky was clear and the Sun's colour was spectacular as night approached. This striking telescopic view even captures the Sun's swollen and distorted shape from the southern coast of the UK. Reflecting a bright column of sunlight, ...

The Bloop: A Mysterious Sound from...

2010-04-27

What created this strange sound in Earth's Pacific Ocean? Pictured above is a visual representation of a loud and unusual sound, dubbed a Bloop, captured by deep sea microphones in 1997. In the above graph, time is shown on the horizontal axis, ...

Dust Pillar of the Carina Nebula

2010-04-26

Inside the head of this interstellar monster is a star that is slowly destroying it. The monster, on the right, is actually an inanimate pillar of gas and dust that measures over a light year in length. The star, not itself visible through the ...