NGC 4449: Close-Up of a Small Galaxy
Grand spiral galaxies often seem to get all the glory. Their newly formed, bright, blue star clusters along beautiful, symmetric spiral arms are guaranteed to attract attention. But small irregular galaxies form stars too, like NGC 4449, located ...
The Most Distant Sun
When is the Sun most distant from Earth? It happened again just this past weekend. A common misconception is that the Sun is most distant during the winter, when it's the coldest. In truth, however, the seasonal temperatures are more greatly ...
Shuttle Ferry
How does a space shuttle that landed in California get back to Florida for its next launch? The answer is by ferry. NASA operates two commercial Boeing 747 airplanes modified to carry a space shuttle on their backs. Designated officially as ...
Infrared Trifid
The Trifid Nebula, aka Messier 20, is easy to find with a small telescope, a well known stop in the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. But where visible light pictures show the nebula divided into three parts by dark, obscuring dust lanes, ...
Bright Galaxy NGC 2903
Spiral galaxy NGC 2903 is only some 20 million light-years distant in the constellation Leo. One of the brighter galaxies visible from the northern hemisphere, it is surprisingly missing from Charles Messier's famous catalog of celestial sights. ...
Night-Shining Clouds
Alluring noctilucent or night-shining clouds lie near the edge of space, some 80 kilometers above Earth's surface. Of course, when viewed from space the clouds are more properly called polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs) -- seen here for the first ...
Red, White, and Blue Sky
Contrasting colors in this beautiful sunset sky were captured on June 30 from Clear Creek Canyon Observatory in central Arizona, USA. The twilight scene includes brilliant Venus as the evening star, with a bright Saturn just above it, shining ...
At the Edge of Victoria Crater
We're going in. The robotic Opportunity rover currently rolling across Mars has been prowling around the edge of the largest crater it has visited since landing over three years ago. It has been studying Victoria crater and looking for a way ...
Zooming in to the Pelican Nebula
Where is the Pelican Nebula? APOD features many objects in the night sky, but usually does not have the resources to show where each one lies. Today, thanks to inventive digital manipulations of Filipe Alves, it is possible to show you exactly ...
Steep Cliffs on Mars
Vertical cliffs of nearly two kilometers occur near the North Pole of Mars. Also visible in the above image of the Martian North Polar Cap are red areas of rock and sand, white areas of ice, and dark areas of unknown composition but hypothesized ...
