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NGC 6995: The Bat Nebula

Copyright: Mike Taivalmaa Can you see the bat? It haunts this cosmic close-up of the eastern Veil Nebula. The Veil Nebula itself is a large supernova remnant, the expanding debris cloud from the death explosion of a massive star. While the Veil is roughly circular in shape and covers nearly 3 degrees on the sky […]

Quarter Moon and Sister Stars

Copyright: Alan Dyer, TWAN Nine days ago, two quite different sky icons were imaged rising together. Specifically, Earth’s Moon shared the eastern sky with the sister stars of the Pleiades cluster, as viewed from Alberta, Canada. Astronomical images of the well-known Pleiades often show the star cluster’s alluring blue reflection nebulas, but here they are […]

A Triangular Prominence Hovers Over the Sun

Copyright: Andrea Vanoni Why is there a triangle hovering over the Sun? Although the shape is unusual, the type of structure is not: it is part of an evolving solar prominence. Looping magnetic fields on the Sun channel the flow of energetic particles, sometimes holding glowing gaseous structures aloft for months. A prominence glows brightly […]

The Moon Dressed Like Saturn

Copyright: Francisco Sojuel Why does Saturn appear so big? It doesn’t — what is pictured are foreground clouds on Earth crossing in front of the Moon. The Moon shows a slight crescent phase with most of its surface visible by reflected Earthlight, known as Da Vinci glow. The Sun directly illuminates the brightly lit lunar […]

IFN and the NGC 7771 Group

Copyright: Steve Mandel Galaxies of the NGC 7771 Group are featured in this intriguing skyscape. Some 200 million light-years distant toward the constellation Pegasus, NGC 7771 is the large, edge-on spiral near center, about 75,000 light-years across, with two smaller galaxies below it. Large spiral NGC 7769 is seen face-on to the right. Galaxies of […]

Southern Moonscape

Copyright: Lorand Fenyes The Moon’s south pole is toward the top left of this detailed telescopic moonscape. Captured on August 23, it looks across the rugged southern lunar highlands. The view’s foreshortened perspective heightens the impression of a dense field of craters and makes the craters themselves appear more oval shaped close to the lunar […]

Star Factory Messier 17

Copyright: Gaetan Maxant A nearby star factory known as Messier 17 lies some 5,500 light-years away in the nebula-rich constellation Sagittarius. At that distance, this 1.5 degree wide field-of-view would span about 150 light-years. In the sharp color composite image faint details of the region’s gas and dust clouds are highlighted with narrowband image data […]

Tulip Nebula and Black Hole Cygnus X-1

Copyright: Anirudh Shastry When can you see a black hole, a tulip, and a swan all at once? At night — if the timing is right, and if your telescope is pointed in the right direction. The complex and beautiful Tulip Nebula blossoms about 8,000 light-years away toward the constellation of Cygnus the Swan. Ultraviolet […]

Moon Eclipses Saturn

Copyright: Pau Montplet Sanz What if Saturn disappeared? Sometimes, it does. It doesn’t really go away, though, it just disappears from view when our Moon moves in front. Such a Saturnian eclipse, more formally called an occultation, was visible along a long swath of Earth — from Peru, across the Atlantic Ocean, to Italy — […]

Perseid Meteors Over Inner Mongolia

Copyright: Did you see it? One of the more common questions during a meteor shower occurs because the time it takes for a meteor to flash is similar to the time it takes for a head to turn. Possibly, though, the glory of seeing bright meteors shoot across the sky — while knowing that they […]

Fresh Tiger Stripes on Saturn’s Enceladus

Copyright: Do underground oceans vent through canyons on Saturn’s moon Enceladus? Long features dubbed tiger stripes are known to be spewing ice from the moon’s icy interior into space, creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon’s South Pole and creating Saturn’s mysterious E-ring. Evidence for this has come from the robot Cassini […]

South Pacific Shadowset

Copyright: full Moon The full Moon and Earth’s shadow set together in this island skyscape. The alluring scene was captured Tuesday morning, August 20, from Fiji, South Pacific Ocean, planet Earth. For early morning risers shadowset in the western sky is a daily apparition. Still, the grey-blue shadow is often overlooked in favor of a […]

Supernova Remnant CTA 1

Copyright: Thomas Lelu There is a quiet pulsar at the heart of CTA 1. The supernova remnant was discovered as a source of emission at radio wavelengths by astronomers in 1960 and since identified as the result of the death explosion of a massive star. But no radio pulses were detected from the expected pulsar, […]

The Dark Tower in Scorpius

Copyright: Mike Selby In silhouette against a crowded star field along the tail of the arachnological constellation Scorpius, this dusty cosmic cloud evokes for some the image of an ominous dark tower. In fact, monstrous clumps of dust and molecular gas collapsing to form stars may well lurk within the dark nebula, a structure that […]

Fermi’s 12-year All-Sky Gamma-ray Map

Copyright: Forget X-ray vision — imagine what you could see with gamma-ray vision! The featured all-sky map shows what the universe looks like to NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Fermi sees light with energies about a billion times what the human eye can see, and the map combines 12 years of Fermi observations. The colors […]