Saturn now rises before midnight in planet Earth’s sky. On July 24, the naked-eye planet was in close conjunction, close on the sky, to a waning gibbous Moon. But from some locations on planet Earth the ringed gas giant was occulted, disappearing behind the Moon for about an hour from skies over parts of Asia […]
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a wonderfully detailed snapshot of the spiral galaxy NGC 3430 that lies 100 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Leo Minor. via NASA https://ift.tt/Dqm5dnp
From our vantage point in the Milky Way Galaxy, we see NGC 6946 face-on. The big, beautiful spiral galaxy is located just 20 million light-years away, behind a veil of foreground dust and stars in the high and far-off constellation Cepheus. In this sharp telescopic portrait, from the core outward the galaxy’s colors change from […]
From left to right, NASA astronaut candidates Anil Menon, Deniz Burnham, and Marcos Berrios pose for a photograph in front of NASA’s Artemis I Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft at Launch Complex 39B at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sept. 2, 2022. via NASA https://ift.tt/JqZcK2V
These cosmic clouds have blossomed 1,300 light-years away in the fertile starfields of the constellation Cepheus. Called the Iris Nebula, NGC 7023 is not the only nebula to evoke the imagery of flowers. Still, this deep telescopic image shows off the Iris Nebula’s range of colors and symmetries embedded in surrounding fields of interstellar dust. […]
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of Saturn on July 4, 2020. Two of Saturn’s icy moons are clearly visible in this exposure: Mimas at right, and Enceladus at bottom. This image is taken as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) project. OPAL is helping scientists understand the atmospheric dynamics and evolution […]
Our Moon doesn’t really have craters this big. Earth’s Moon, Luna, also doesn’t naturally show this spikey texture, and its colors are more subtle. But this digital creation is based on reality. The featured image is a digital composite of a good Moon image and surface height data taken from NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter […]
Astronauts Eileen M. Collins, STS-93 mission commander, and Jeffrey S. Ashby, pilot, peruse checklists on Columbia’s middeck. via NASA https://ift.tt/KbXIVes
What powers the Crab Nebula? A city-sized magnetized neutron star spinning around 30 times a second. Known as the Crab Pulsar, it is the bright spot in the center of the gaseous swirl at the nebula’s core. About 10 light-years across, the spectacular picture of the Crab Nebula (M1) frames a swirling central disk and […]
The barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 is interacting with a smaller galaxy to the upper left. The smaller galaxy has likely stripped gas from NGC 6872 to feed the supermassive black hole in its center. via NASA https://ift.tt/XkIN9RP