Copyright: Is this one galaxy or two? Although it looks like one, the answer is two. One path to this happening is when a small galaxy collides with a larger galaxy and ends up in the center. But in the featured image, something more rare is going on. Here, the central light-colored elliptical galaxy is […]
Copyright: Infrared: NASA, Spitzer Space Telescope; Visible: Oliver Czernetz, Siding Spring Obs. The Great Nebula in Orion is a colorful place. Visible to the unaided eye, it appears as a small fuzzy patch in the constellation of Orion. Long exposure, multi-wavelength images like this, however, show the Orion Nebula to be a busy neighborhood of […]
Copyright: In digital brush strokes, Jupiter’s signature atmospheric bands and vortices were used to form this interplanetary post-impressionist work of art. The creative image from citizen scientist Rick Lundh uses data from the Juno spacecraft’s JunoCam. To paint on the digital canvas, a JunoCam image with contrasting light and dark tones was chosen for processing […]
Copyright: Dan Bartlett In late March, the comet now designated C/2025 F2 SWAN was found independently by citizen scientists Vladimir Bezugly, Michael Mattiazzo, and Rob Matson while examining publicly available image data from the Solar Wind ANisotropies (SWAN) camera on the sun-staring SOHO spacecraft. Comet SWAN’s coma, its greenish color a signature of diatomic carbon […]
Copyright: Daniel Adibi Galaxies of the Virgo Cluster are scattered across this nearly 4 degree wide telescopic field of view. About 50 million light-years distant, the Virgo Cluster is the closest large galaxy cluster to our own local galaxy group. Prominent here are Virgo’s bright elliptical galaxies from the Messier catalog, M87 at bottom left, […]
Copyright: Taavi Niittee (Tõrva Astronomy Club) What created the unusual halo around the Cat’s Eye Nebula? No one is sure. What is sure is that the Cat’s Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is one of the best known planetary nebulae on the sky. Although haunting symmetries are seen in the bright central region, this image was […]
Copyright: What happens when a star runs out of nuclear fuel? For stars like our Sun, the center condenses into a white dwarf while the outer atmosphere is expelled into space to appear as a planetary nebula. The expelled outer atmosphere of planetary nebula NGC 1514 appears to be a jumble of bubbles — when […]
Copyright: What’s happening at the center of our galaxy? It’s hard to tell with optical telescopes since visible light is blocked by intervening interstellar dust. In other bands of light, though, such as radio, the galactic center can be imaged and shows itself to be quite an interesting and active place. The featured picture shows […]
Copyright: What created this unusual hole in Mars? Actually, there are numerous holes pictured in this Swiss cheese-like landscape, with all-but-one of them showing a dusty, dark, Martian terrain beneath evaporating, light, carbon dioxide ice. The most unusual hole is on the upper right, spans about 100 meters, and seems to punch through to a […]
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 […]
