A broad expanse of glowing gas and dust presents a bird-like visage to astronomers from planet Earth, suggesting its popular moniker – The Seagull Nebula. Using narrowband image data, this 3-panel mosaic of the cosmic bird covers a 2.5 degree swath across the plane of the Milky Way, near the direction of Sirius, alpha star […]
Snow and ice cover mountains of the Tien Shan range in this photograph taken from the International Space Station (ISS) on Feb. 9, 2022. via NASA https://ift.tt/yuOAKj9
Gravitational lensing by the galaxy cluster MACS0647 — in which the massive foreground cluster distorts and lenses the light emitted by distant background galaxies along the line of sight — is on vivid display here in this recent multi-color infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). In particular, the background source MACS0647-JD is […]
Snoopy, the zero gravity indicator that flew aboard Orion during the Artemis I mission, wears a smile after being unpacked from his transport case on Jan. 5, 2023. via NASA https://ift.tt/WTGUF4K
Why are there oxygen-emitting arcs near the direction of the Andromeda galaxy? No one is sure. The gas arcs, shown in blue, were discovered and first confirmed by amateur astronomers just last year. The two main origin hypotheses for the arcs are that they really are close to Andromeda (M31), or that they are just […]
Our Moon doesn’t really look like this. Earth’s Moon, Luna, doesn’t naturally show this rich texture, and its colors are more subtle. But this digital creation is based on reality. The featured image is a composite of multiple images and enhanced to bring up real surface features. The enhancements, for example, show more clearly craters […]
This is the mess that is left when a star explodes. The Crab Nebula, the result of a supernova seen in 1054 AD, is filled with mysterious filaments. The filaments are not only tremendously complex, but appear to have less mass than expelled in the original supernova and a higher speed than expected from a […]
Perihelion for 2023, Earth’s closest approach to the Sun, was on January 4 at 16:17 UTC. That was less than 24 hours after this sharp image of the Sun’s disk was recorded with telescope and H-alpha filter from Sidney, Australia, planet Earth. An H-alpha filter transmits a characteristic red light from hydrogen atoms. In views […]
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthplace, Atlanta, Georgia, is seen on January 20, 2013, in this image from the International Space Station as it flew approximately 240 miles above the city. via NASA https://ift.tt/ORwsFJd
The most massive young star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud is NGC 346, embedded in our small satellite galaxy’s largest star forming region some 210,000 light-years distant. Of course the massive stars of NGC 346 are short lived, but very energetic. Their winds and radiation sculpt the edges of the region’s dusty molecular cloud […]