A 2000 Leonid Through Orion
The Leonid Meteor Shower this year could be described as good but not great. During November 17 and 18 the Earth crossed through several streams of sand-sized grit left orbiting the Sun by Comet Tempel-Tuttle. Several distinct peaks in meteor ...
Our Dusty Universe
What's black & white and red all over? Add our universe to this list. Adrift in a vast sea of darkness are not only familiar bright stars but dust that glows predominantly in far-infrared light. This cosmological dust was recently discovered ...
Leonid Sunrise
Such beautiful things begin as grains of sand. Locked in an oyster a granule grows into an iridescent pearl, lustrous and lovely to behold. While hurtling through the atmosphere at 70 kilometers per second, a cosmic sand grain becomes an ...
A Daytime Fireball in 1944
While stationed in central Africa in December 1944, Norman Appleton witnessed a meteor so bright he remembered it his entire life. Right before his eyes a tremendous smoking fireball streaked across the daytime sky. Years later, as an ...
Coronal Rain, Solar Storm
In this picture, the Sun's surface is quite dark. A frame from a movie recorded on November 9th by the orbiting TRACE telescope, it shows coronal loops lofted over a solar active region. Glowing brightly in extreme ultraviolet light, the hot ...
The Yardangs Of Mars
OK, fans of classic science fiction might be disappointed. The yardangs are not barsoomian warriors in a newly discovered Edgar Rice Burroughs tale of adventure and conquest on the Red Planet. In fact yardangs, geologists' term for narrow, ...
Disorder in Stephan's Quintet
What are four closely grouped galaxies doing in this image? The grouping composes a majority of the large galaxies in Stephan's Quintet, with the fifth prominent galaxy located off the above image to the lower right. Three of these four galaxies ...
The Lyman Alpha Forest
We live in a forest. Strewn throughout the universe are "trees" of hydrogen gas that absorb light from distant objects. These gas clouds leave numerous absorption lines in a distant quasar's spectra, together called the Lyman-alpha forest. ...
The First Lunar Observatory
The first, and so far only, lunar astronomical observatory was deployed by the Apollo 16 crew in 1972. The Far Ultraviolet Camera / Spectrograph used a 3-inch diameter Schmidt telescope to photograph the Earth, nebulae, star clusters, and the ...
X-Ray Cygnus A
Amazingly detailed, this false-color x-ray image is centered on the galaxy Cygnus A. Recorded by the orbiting Chandra Observatory, Cygnus A is seen here as a spectacular high energy x-ray source. But it is actually more famous at the low energy ...
