Dark Lunar Eclipse
The Moon passed close to the center of Earth's shadow on August 28th. Seen best by skywatchers in western North America, and the Pacific region, the resulting total lunar eclipse was a dark one, lasting about 90 minutes. In this telescopic image ...
Gigantic Jets Over Oklahoma
Have you ever seen a gigantic jet? They are extremely rare but tremendously powerful. Gigantic jets are a newly discovered type of lightning discharge between some thunderstorms and the Earth's ionosphere high above them. Pictured above is one ...
Could Hydrogen Peroxide Life Survive...
Is there life on Mars? Although no unambiguous evidence for indigenous life on Mars has ever been found, a more speculative question -- could some life forms survive on Mars -- has taken on a new twist. Two planetary scientists recently ...
Huge Void Implicated in Distant Universe
What has created this huge empty volume in the universe? No one is yet sure, and even the extent of the estimated billion-light year void is being researched. The void is not a hole in space like a black hole, but rather a vast region of the ...
A Total Lunar Eclipse Over North...
This coming Tuesday, our Moon will appear to disappear. A similar total lunar eclipse is seen above in a time lapse image captured in 2003 over North Carolina, USA. As the Earth moves between the Moon and the Sun, the Earth's shadow fell on ...
Just Passing Through
M33 is a big, beautiful spiral galaxy a mere 3 million light-years away, understandably a popular target for enthusiastic astro-imagers. Just as understandably, interfering satellite trails and airplane streaks that are becoming more common in ...
Astronomer's Moon
Jupiter is an astronomer's planet -- its large size and contrasting global cloud belts and zones allow detailed studies with a range of earthbound telescopes. On the other hand, most telescopic views of Jupiter's moons usually show only ...
Southern Moonscape
The Moon's south pole is near the top of this sharp telescopic view looking across the southern lunar highlands. Recorded on August 3rd from Tecumseh, Oklahoma, planet Earth, the foreshortened perspective heightens the impression of a dense field ...
Tentacles of the Tarantula Nebula
The largest, most violent star forming region known in the whole Local Group of galaxies lies in our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Were the Tarantula Nebula at the distance of the Orion Nebula -- a local star forming ...
A Red Dome Under the Big Dipper
Why would the dome of a telescopic observatory appear translucent red? As one of the telescopes of the Etscorn Observatory of New Mexico Tech waited to inspect small portions of the night sky, playful observers decided to make this unusual ...
