Sharp Silhouette

2006-09-21 Thierry Legault

Though it's 93 million miles away, the Sun still hurts your eyes when you look at it. But bright sunlight (along with accurate planning and proper equipment!) resulted in this sharp silhouette of spaceship and space station. The amazing ...

The International Space Station...

2006-09-20

The developing International Space Station (ISS) has changed its appearance again. Over the past few days, the Space Shuttle Atlantis visited the ISS and added pieces of the Integrated Truss Structure, including an impressively long array of ...

Beagle Crater on Mars

2006-09-19

What have we found on the way to large Victoria Crater? Smaller Beagle Crater. The robotic Opportunity rover rolling across Mars stopped at Beagle Crater early last month and took an impressively detailed 360-degree panorama of the alien ...

Eris: The Largest Known Dwarf Planet

2006-09-18 W. M. Keck Observatory

Is Pluto the largest dwarf planet? No! Currently, the largest known dwarf planet is (136199) Eris, renamed last week from 2003 UB313. Eris is just slightly larger than Pluto, but orbits as far as twice Pluto's distance from the Sun. Eris is ...

Anticrepuscular Rays Over Florida

2006-09-17 Daniel Herron

What's happening over the horizon? Although the scene may appear somehow supernatural, nothing more unusual is occurring than a setting Sun and some well placed clouds. Strangely, the actual sunset was occurring in the opposite direction from ...

Discovery Orbiter Anaglyph

2006-09-16

Approaching the International Space Station on STS-121 in July, the Shuttle Orbiter Discovery posed for a series of photographs. The process was part of an inspection to check for damage to the orbiter, but against the backdrop of planet Earth ...

11 Hour Star Trails

2006-09-15 Josch Hambsch

Fix your camera to a tripod, lock the shutter open, and you can make an image of star trails - graceful concentric arcs traced by the stars as planet Earth rotates on its axis. Of course, the length of the star trails will depend on the exposure ...

M33: Spiral Galaxy in Triangulum

2006-09-14 Thomas V. Davis

The small, northern constellation Triangulum harbors this magnificent face-on spiral galaxy, M33. Its popular names include the Pinwheel Galaxy or just the Triangulum Galaxy. M33 is over 50,000 light-years in diameter, third largest in the Local ...

Atlantis to Orbit

2006-09-13

Birds don't fly this high. Airplanes don't go this fast. The Statue of Liberty weighs less. No species other than human can even comprehend what is going on, nor could any human just a millennium ago. The launch of a rocket bound for space is ...

Saturn at Night

2006-09-12

This is what Saturn looks like at night. In contrast to the human-made lights that cause the nighttime side of Earth to glow faintly, Saturn's faint nighttime glow is primarily caused by sunlight reflecting off of its own majestic rings. The ...