Astronomisches Bild des Tages

2006-08-06

High atop a Chilean mountain lies one of the premier observatories of the southern sky: the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). Pictured above is the dome surrounding one of the site's best known instruments, the 4-meter Blanco ...

2006-08-05 Stefan Seip

In this beautiful celestial still life composed with a cosmic brush, dusty nebula NGC 2170 shines at the upper left. Reflecting the light of nearby hot stars, NGC 2170 is joined by other bluish reflection nebulae and a compact red emission region ...

2006-08-04

Get out your red/blue glasses and gaze across Burns Cliff along the inner wall of Endurance crater on Mars! The view from the perspective of Mars rover Opportunity is a color anaglyph - two different images are presented to the left and right ...

2006-08-03 RicksAstro Astrophotography

While searching the skies above 18th century France for comets, astronomer Charles Messier diligently recorded this object as number 27 on his list of things which are definitely not comets. So what is it? Well, 20th century astronomers would ...

2006-08-02 Mark Garlick

Might it rain cold methane on Saturn's Titan? Recent analyses of measurements taken by the Huygen's probe that landed on Titan in 2005 January indicate that the atmosphere is actually saturated with methane at a height of about 8 kilometers. ...

2006-08-01 Wally Pacholka

If sometimes it appears that the entire Milky Way Galaxy is raining down on your head, do not despair. It happens twice a day. As the Sun rises in the East, wonders of the night sky become less bright than the sunlight scattered by our own ...

2006-07-31

Have methane lakes been discovered on Saturn's Titan? That exciting possibility was uncovered from analyses of radar images returned last week by the robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn. The above image is a radar reflection from ...

2006-07-30

The largest canyon in the Solar System cuts a wide swath across the face of Mars. Named Valles Marineris, the grand valley extends over 3,000 kilometers long, spans as much as 600 kilometers across, and delves as much as 8 kilometers deep. By ...

2006-07-29

What do you call a group of black holes ... a flock, a brace, a swarm? Monitoring a region around the center of our Galaxy, astronomers have indeed found evidence for a surprisingly large number of variable x-ray sources - likely black holes or ...

2006-07-28

These four panels show x-ray images of expanding cosmic debris clouds, tens of light-years across, in nearby galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud. The supernova remnants (SNRs) are the results of two types of stellar explosions and are arranged in ...