Copyright: Jordi Coy Most of us watch the Moon at night. But the Moon spends nearly as many daylight hours above our horizon, though in bright daytime skies the lunar disk looks pale and can be a little harder to see. Of course in daytime skies the Moon also appears to cycle through its phases, […]
Copyright: A.J. Smadi Made with a telescope shaded from bright sunlight by an umbrella, on April 5 a well-planned video captured a crescent Venus shining in clear daytime skies from Shoreline, Washington, USA at 11:57AM Pacific Time. It also caught the International Space Station in this single video frame. In close conjunction with the bright […]
Copyright: Daniel Yang K. From a garden on planet Earth, 38 hours of exposure with a camera and small telescope produced this cosmic photo of the M81 galaxy group. In fact, the group’s dominant galaxy M81 is near the center of the frame sporting grand spiral arms and a bright yellow core. Also known as […]
Copyright: What’s at the tip of this interstellar jet? First let’s consider the jet: it is being expelled by a star system just forming and is cataloged as Herbig-Haro 49 (HH 49). The star system expelling this jet is not visible — it is off to the lower right. The complex conical structure featured in […]
Copyright: Sometimes, the Moon visits the Pleiades. Technically, this means that the orbit of our Moon takes it directly in front of the famous Pleiades star cluster, which is far in the distance. The technical term for the event is an occultation, and the Moon is famous for its rare occultations of all planets and […]
Copyright: How much mass do flocculent spirals hide? The featured image of flocculent spiral galaxy NGC 4414 was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope to help answer this question. Flocculent spirals — galaxies without well-defined spiral arms — are a quite common form of galaxy, and NGC 4414 is one of the closest. Stars and […]
Copyright: Why are there so many moonquakes? Analyses of seismometers left on the moon during the Apollo moon landings reveal a surprising number of moonquakes occurring within 100 kilometers of the surface. In fact, 62 moonquakes were detected in data recorded between 1972 and 1977. Many of these moonquakes are not only strong enough to […]
Copyright: Bertrand Kulik In dramatic silhouette against a cloudy daytime sky over Paris, France, gargoyles cast their monstrous gaze outward from the west facade of Notre Dame Cathedral. Taken on March 29, this telephoto snapshot also captures the dramatic silhouette of a New Moon against the bright solar disk in a partial solar eclipse. Happening […]
Copyright: Jiang Wu Scanning the skies for galaxies, Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson and colleagues identified some 100 compact groups of galaxies, now appropriately called Hickson Compact Groups. The four prominent galaxies seen in this intriguing telescopic skyscape are one such group, Hickson 44. The galaxy group is about 100 million light-years distant, far beyond the […]
Copyright: Giorgia Hofer A 26 hour old Moon poses behind the craggy outline of the Italian Dolomites in this twilight mountain and skyscape. The one second long exposure was captured near moonset on March 30. And while only a a sliver of its sunlit surface is visible, most of the Moon’s disk can be seen […]
Copyright: Why does Jupiter have rings? Jupiter’s main ring was discovered in 1979 by NASA’s passing Voyager 1 spacecraft, but its origin was then a mystery. Data from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003, however, confirmed the hypothesis that this ring was created by meteoroid impacts on small nearby moons. As […]
Copyright: Jason Kurth; Music: House of the Rising Sun (Sebastia McQueen via SoundCloud) Can the Sun appear to rise twice at the same time? This was just the case a few days ago from Les Escoumins, Quebec, Canada as our Solar System’s bright central orb rose just as it was being partially eclipsed by the […]
Copyright: If you watch long enough, a comet will appear. Before then, you will see our Solar System from inside the orbit of Mercury as recorded by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe looping around the Sun. The video captures coronal streamers into the solar wind, a small Coronal Mass Ejection, and planets including, in order of […]
Copyright: Wioleta Gorecka What if the Sun and Moon rose together? That happened yesterday over some northern parts of planet Earth as a partial solar eclipse occurred shortly after sunrise. Regions that experienced the Moon blocking part of the Sun included northeastern parts of North America and northwestern parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa. The […]
Copyright: Get out your red/blue glasses and float next to Helene, small, icy moon of Saturn. Appropriately named, Helene is a Trojan moon, so called because it orbits at a Lagrange point. A Lagrange point is a gravitationally stable position near two massive bodies, in this case Saturn and larger moon Dione. In fact, irregularly […]
