Copyright: Antoine & Dalia Grelin The dark Horsehead Nebula and the glowing Orion Nebula are contrasting cosmic vistas. Adrift 1,500 light-years away in one of the night sky’s most recognizable constellations, they appear in opposite corners of the above stunning mosaic. The familiar Horsehead nebula appears as a dark cloud, a small silhouette notched against […]
Copyright: If you could fly over Mars, what might you see? The featured image shows exactly this in the form of a Mars Express vista captured over a particularly interesting region on Mars in July. The picture’s most famous feature is Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the Solar System, visible on the upper right. […]
Copyright: R. Gendler & R. Croman The most distant object easily visible to the unaided eye is M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy. Even at some two and a half million light-years distant, this immense spiral galaxy — spanning over 200,000 light years — is visible, although as a faint, nebulous cloud in the constellation Andromeda. […]
Copyright: Mars has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, named for the figures in Greek mythology Fear and Panic. Detailed surface views of smaller moon Deimos are shown in both these panels. The images were taken in 2009, by the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, NASA’s long-lived interplanetary internet satellite. The […]
Copyright: Ringed ice giant Neptune lies near the center of this sharp near-infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope. The dim and distant world is the farthest planet from the Sun, about 30 times farther away than planet Earth. But in the stunning Webb view, the planet’s dark and ghostly appearance is due to […]
Copyright: Eric Benson About 70,000 light-years across, NGC 247 is a spiral galaxy smaller than our Milky Way. Measured to be only 11 million light-years distant it is nearby though. Tilted nearly edge-on as seen from our perspective, it dominates this telescopic field of view toward the southern constellation Cetus. The pronounced void on one […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 — […]
