At year’s end, Mars still shines bright, In Taurus, headstrong and right, Its yellow hue in the night, Dominates view with all its might. Aldebaran and Hyades, too, Pleiades, a star cluster true, Red giant Aldebaran at the left, But not a member, a surprise bereft. Hyades cluster far away, But Aldebaran’s distance, half that […]
This image taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft’s HIRISE instrument on Oct. 23, 2022, of the northern plains of Arabia Terra shows craters that contain curious deposits with mysterious shapes and distribution. via NASA https://ift.tt/18zZFTK
The Horsehead Nebula, famous celestial dark marking also known as Barnard 33, is notched against a background glow of emission nebulae in this sharp cosmic skyscape. About five light-years “tall” the Horsehead lies some 1,500 light-years away in the constellation of Orion. Within the region’s fertile molecular cloud complex, the expanse of obscuring dust has […]
Charles Messier described the eighty-eight As a spiral nebula, stars unseen But we now know it’s a galaxy bright Filled with stars, gas, and dust in flight M88 is located in the Virgo cluster Some fifty million light-years away, in muster Its spiral arms, blue and young, are easy to trace With pink regions forming […]
The James Webb Space Telescope spies the spiral galaxy NGC 7469, located 220 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus, in this image released on Dec. 21, 2022. via NASA https://ift.tt/gkYwQs6
Have you ever seen an entire rainbow? From the ground, typically, only the top portion of a rainbow is visible because directions toward the ground have fewer raindrops. From the air, though, the entire 360-degree circle of a rainbow is more commonly visible. Pictured here, a full-circle rainbow was captured over the Lofoten Islands of […]
The star at the center created everything. Known as the Dragon’s Egg, this star — a rare, hot, luminous O-type star some 40 times as massive as the Sun — created not only the complex nebula (NGC 6164) that immediately surrounds it, but also the encompassing blue halo. Its name is derived, in part, from […]
Asteroid 3200 Phaethon’s annual gift to planet Earth always arrives in December. Otherwise known as the Geminid meteor shower, the source of the meteroid stream is dust shed along the orbit of the mysterious asteroid. Near the December 13/14 peak of the shower’s activity, geminid meteors are captured in this night skyscape, composited from 22 […]
Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was discovered by astronomers using the wide-field survey camera at the Zwicky Transient Facility this year in early March. Since then the new long-period comet has brightened substantially and is now sweeping across the northern constellation Corona Borealis in predawn skies. It’s still too dim to see without a telescope though. […]
On Dec. 24, 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders became the first humans to orbit the Moon, and the first to witness the magnificent sight called “Earthrise.” via NASA https://ift.tt/3vrcNjW