Copyright: What drives auroras on Saturn? To help find out, scientists have sorted through hundreds of infrared images of Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft for other purposes, trying to find enough aurora images to correlate changes and make movies. Once made, some movies clearly show that Saturnian auroras can change not only with the […]
Copyright: Wang Letian These two panels, composed of video frames made with a safe solar telescope and hydrogen alpha filter, show remarkably sharp details on the solar disk and giant prominences along the Sun’s edge on June 6 (top) and June 18. Taken from Beijing, China, they also show a transit of the International Space […]
Copyright: Miguel Claro How far can you see? The Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light years away, is the most distant object easily seen by the unaided eye. Other denizens of the night sky, like stars, clusters, and nebulae, are typically hundreds to thousands of light-years distant. That’s far beyond the Solar System but well within […]
Copyright: Grand design spiral galaxy Messier 99 looks majestic on a truly cosmic scale. This recently processed full galaxy portrait stretches over 70,000 light-years across M99. The sharp view is a combination of ultraviolet, visible, and infrared image data from the Hubble Space Telescope. About 50 million light-years distant toward the well-groomed constellation Coma Bernices, […]
Copyright: How do stars form? Most form in giant molecular clouds located in the central disk of a galaxy. The process is started, influenced, and limited by the stellar winds, jets, high energy starlight, and supernova explosions of previously existing stars. The featured video shows these complex interactions as computed by the STARFORGE simulation of […]
Copyright: How are jets created during star formation? No one is sure, although recent images of the young star system HD 163296 are quite illuminating. The central star in the featured image is still forming but seen already surrounded by a rotating disk and an outward moving jet. The disk is shown in radio waves […]
Copyright: Why does this galaxy have such a long tail? In this stunning vista, based on image data from the Hubble Legacy Archive, distant galaxies form a dramatic backdrop for disrupted spiral galaxy Arp 188, the Tadpole Galaxy. The cosmic tadpole is a mere 420 million light-years distant toward the northern constellation of the Dragon […]
Copyright: Max AlexanderSTFCSPL Today the Sun reaches its northernmost point in planet Earth’s sky. Called a solstice, many cultures mark this date as a change of seasons — from spring to summer in Earth’s Northern Hemisphere and from fall to winter in Earth’s Southern Hemisphere. Precisely, the single time of solstice occurs today for some […]
Copyright: Justin Anderson Nights grow shorter and days grow longer as the summer solstice approaches in the north. Usually seen at high latitudes in summer months, noctilucent or night shining clouds begin to make their appearance. Drifting near the edge of space about 80 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, these icy clouds were still reflecting […]
Copyright: Madhup Rathi Atmospheric refraction flattened the solar disk and distorted its appearance in this telescopic view of an Atlantic sunrise on June 10. From Belmar, New Jersey on the US east coast, the scene was recorded at New Moon during this season’s annular solar eclipse. The Moon in partial silhouette gives the rising Sun […]
Copyright: Joe Navara NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a about 25 light-years across blown by winds from its central, bright, massive star. A triumvirate of astroimagers ( Joe, Glenn, Russell) created this sharp portrait of the cosmic bubble. Their telescopic collaboration collected over 30 hours of narrow band image data isolating […]
Copyright: Stefan Lenz If Scorpius looked this good to the unaided eye, humans might remember it better. Scorpius more typically appears as a few bright stars in a well-known but rarely pointed out zodiacal constellation. To get a spectacular image like this, though, one needs a good camera, a dark sky, and some sophisticated image […]
Copyright: There’s a new rover on Mars. In mid-May, China’s Tianwen-1 mission delivered the Zhurong rover onto the red planet. As Mars means Planet of Fire in Chinese, the Zhurong rover’s name means, roughly, God of Fire in Chinese mythology. Zhurong landed in northern Utopia Planitia, the largest known impact basin in the Solar System, […]
Copyright: What does the largest moon in the Solar System look like? Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, larger than even Mercury and Pluto, has an icy surface speckled with bright young craters overlying a mixture of older, darker, more cratered terrain laced with grooves and ridges. The cause of the grooved terrain remains a topic of research, […]
Copyright: Mike Olbinski Music: Incompetech Is that a cloud or an alien spaceship? It’s an unusual and sometimes dangerous type of thunderstorm cloud called a supercell. Supercells may spawn damaging tornados, hail, downbursts of air, or drenching rain. Or they may just look impressive. A supercell harbors a mesocyclone — a rising column of air […]
