A Year of Extraterrestrial Fountains...
The past year was extraordinary for the discovery of extraterrestrial fountains and flows -- some offering new potential in the search for liquid water and the origin of life beyond planet Earth.. Increased evidence was uncovered that fountains ...
Martian Analemma
On planet Earth, an analemma is the figure-8 loop you get when you mark the position of the Sun at the same time each day throughout the year. But similarly marking the position of the Sun in the Martian sky would produce the simpler, stretched ...
Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka
Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, are the bright bluish stars from east to west (left to right) along the diagonal in this gorgeous cosmic vista. Otherwise known as the Belt of Orion, these three blue supergiant stars are hotter and much more ...
Moon Over Andromeda
The Great Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda (aka M31), a mere 2.5 million light-years distant, is the closest large spiral to our own Milky Way. Andromeda is visible to the unaided eye as a small, faint, fuzzy patch, but because its surface brightness ...
IC 5067: Emission Nebula Close-up
This amazing skyscape lies along a bright ridge of emission in IC 5067, also known as The Pelican Nebula. Appropriately, the Pelican Nebula itself is part of a much larger, complex star-forming region about 2,000 light-years away in the high ...
The Gegenschein
If you look carefully enough, you can even see the glow of the Sun in the opposite direction. At night this glow is known as the gegenschein (German for "counter glow"), and can be seen as a faint glow in an extremely dark sky. The gegenschein ...
Upgrading the International Space...
The International Space Station (ISS) will be the largest human-made object ever to orbit the Earth. The station is so large that it could not be launched all at once -- it is being built piecemeal with large sections added continually by ...
Rumors of a Strange Universe
ght years ago results were first presented indicating that most of the energy in our universe is not in stars or galaxies but is tied to space itself. In the language of cosmologists, a large cosmological constant is directly implied by new ...
The Analemma and the Temple of...
An analemma is that figure-8 curve you get when you mark the position of the Sun at the same time each day throughout planet Earth's year. Above, 47 separate exposures (plus one foreground exposure) were recorded on a single piece of film to ...
The View from Stereo Ahead
On December 22nd, at 0022 Universal Time the Sun reached its southernmost point in Earth's sky marking the final season change for the year 2006. In celebration of the Solstice, consider these images of the Sun from an extreme ultraviolet ...
