Is there a monster in IC 1396? Known to some as the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula, parts of gas and dust clouds of this star formation region may appear to take on foreboding forms, some nearly human. The only real monster here, however, is a bright young star too far from Earth to hurt us. Energetic […]
The strangest moon in the Solar System is bright yellow. The featured picture, an attempt to show how Io would appear in the “true colors” perceptible to the average human eye, was taken in 1999 July by the Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. Io’s colors derive from sulfur and molten silicate […]
Get out your red/blue glasses and check out this stereo view of another world. Fifty years ago the scene was recorded by Apollo 17 mission commander Eugene Cernan on December 11, 1972, one orbit before descending to land on the Moon. The stereo anaglyph was assembled from two photographs (AS17-147-22465, AS17-147-22466) captured from his vantage […]
On flight day 20 of the Artemis I mission, Dec. 5, 2022, Orion captured the Moon on the day of return powered flyby, the final major engine maneuver of the flight test. via NASA https://ift.tt/I5ms0Dl
On the night of December 7 Mars wandered near the Full Moon. In fact the Red Planet was occulted, passing behind the Moon, when viewed from locations across Europe and North America. About an hour after disappearing behind the lunar disk Mars reappears in this stack of sharp video frames captured from San Diego, planet […]
In this illustration by Rick Giudice from August 1973, the Pioneer 10 spacecraft passes by the gas giant planet Jupiter. via NASA https://ift.tt/EZOuI9X
A camera on board the uncrewed Orion spacecraft captured this view on December 5 as Orion approached its return powered flyby of the Moon. Below one of Orion’s extended solar arrays lies dark, smooth, terrain along the western edge of the Oceanus Procellarum. Prominent on the lunar nearside Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms, is […]
This classic photograph of the Earth was taken on Dec. 7, 1972, by the crew of the final Apollo mission, Apollo 17, as they traveled toward the moon on their lunar landing mission. via NASA https://ift.tt/y9GWh2q
A mere seven hundred light years from Earth, toward the constellation Aquarius, a sun-like star is dying. The dying star’s last few thousand years have produced the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), a well studied and nearby example of a Planetary Nebula, typical of this final phase of stellar evolution. Combining narrow band image data from […]
In this Dec. 1993, onboard view from Space Shuttle mission STS-61 shows astronauts Story Musgrave and Jeffrey Hoffman’s Extra Vehicular Activity (EVA) to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. via NASA https://ift.tt/nT5Mts0