The first Full Moon of 2023 is in the sky tonight opposite the Sun at 23:08 UTC. Big and beautiful, the Moon at its brightest phase should be easy to spot. Still, for quick reference images captured near the times of all the full moons of 2022 are aranged in this dedicated astro-imaging project from […]
On April 8, 2022, this 30-second exposure captured the International Space Station as it passed over the Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. via NASA https://ift.tt/RZ0MSIc
Hurtling through a cosmic dust cloud a mere 400 light-years away, the lovely Pleiades or Seven Sisters open star cluster is well-known for its striking blue reflection nebulae. It lies in the night sky toward the constellation Taurus and the Orion Arm of our Milky Way galaxy. The sister stars are not related to the […]
Support teams work around the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endurance spacecraft shortly after it landed on Friday, May 6, 2022 with Crew-3 NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Kayla Barron, Tom Marshburn, and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer aboard. via NASA https://ift.tt/7aFrkOd
Can a gas cloud eat a galaxy? It’s not even close. The “claw” of this odd looking “creature” in the featured photo is a gas cloud known as a cometary globule. This globule, however, has ruptured. Cometary globules are typically characterized by dusty heads and elongated tails. These features cause cometary globules to have visual […]
An osprey is seen in front of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard is seen atop a mobile launcher at Launch Pad 39B as launch preparations continued Friday, Sept. 2, 2022, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. via NASA https://ift.tt/AZW7XrL
This line of stars is real. A little too faint to see with the unaided eye, Kemble’s Cascade of stars inspires awe when seen with binoculars. Like the Big Dipper though, Kemble’s Cascade is an asterism, not a constellation. The asterism is visible in the northern sky toward the long-necked constellation of the Giraffe (Camelopardalis). […]
Look up tonight and see a whole bunch of planets. Just after sunset, looking west, planets Venus, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars will all be simultaneously visible. Listed west to east, this planetary lineup will have Venus nearest the horizon, but setting shortly after the Sun. It doesn’t matter where on Earth you live because this […]
There, that dot on the right, that’s the largest rock known in our Solar System. It is larger than every known asteroid, moon, and comet nucleus. It is larger than any other local rocky planet. This rock is so large its gravity makes it into a large ball that holds heavy gases near its surface. […]
Makemake (sounds like MAH-kay MAH-kay), second brightest dwarf planet of the Kuiper belt, has a moon. Nicknamed MK2, Makemake’s moon reflects sunlight with a charcoal-dark surface, about 1,300 times fainter than its parent body. Still, in 2016 it was spotted in Hubble Space Telescope observations intended to search for faint companions with the same technique […]