A Year of Resolving Backgrounds
No matter which direction you look, no matter what type of light you see, the sky glows - but why? The sources of many of these background radiations have remained long-standing puzzles, but this millennial year brought some partial resolutions. ...
The Dark Horsehead Nebula
While drifting through the cosmos this magnificent interstellar dust cloud, sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, has chanced to assume a recognizable shape. Fittingly named The Horsehead Nebula it is embedded in the immense complex of star ...
Jupiter, Io, and Shadow
Just as planets orbit our Sun, Jupiter's Moons orbit Jupiter. Pictured above is the closest of Jupiter's Galilean Satellites, Io, superposed in front of the giant planet it circles. To the left of Io is a dark spot that is its own shadow. The ...
The Eclipse Tree
If you look closely at the shadow of this tree, you will see something quite unusual: it is composed of hundreds of images of a partially eclipsed Sun. Early today, trees across North America will be casting similar shadows as a partial eclipse ...
NGC 1850: Gas Clouds and Star Clusters
There's nothing like it in our own Galaxy. Globular clusters as young as NGC 1850 don't exist here. Globular clusters only 40 millions of years old can still be found in the neighboring LMC galaxy, though, but perhaps none so unusual as NGC ...
Summer at the South Pole
The December solstice brings the beginning of Winter to Earth's Northern Hemisphere and Summer time to the South! This view of Earth's Southern Hemisphere near the beginning of Summer was created using images from the Galileo spacecraft taken ...
Simulated Supergiant Star
Looking for that perfect holiday gift for an astronomer? Consider this "star in a box". Of course, the box is actually a computational box consisting of a three dimensional grid of points, and the star is a virtual one whose physical properties ...
Solstice And Season's Eclipse
Today the Sun reaches its southernmost point in planet Earth's sky at 13:37 UT. This celestial event is known as a solstice, marking the beginning of Summer in the Southern Hemisphere and Winter in the North. But this year, the solstice will be ...
Sgr A*: Fast Stars Near the Galactic...
Why are these stars moving so fast? Shown above is a time-lapse movie in infrared light detailing how stars in the central light-year of our Galaxy have moved over the past eight years. The yellow mark at the image center represents the ...
A Close-Up of Aurora on Jupiter
Jupiter has aurorae. Like Earth, the magnetic field of the gas giant funnels charged particles released from the Sun onto the poles. As these particles strike the atmosphere, electrons are temporarily knocked away from existing gas molecules. ...
