A mere 46 million light-years distant, spiral galaxy NGC 2841 can be found in planet Earth’s night sky toward the northern constellation of Ursa Major. This sharp image centered on the gorgeous island universe also captures spiky foreground Milky Way stars and more distant background galaxies within the same telescopic field of view. It shows […]

Stars leave streaks of light in concentric circles in this Mar 16, 2012, view from the International Space Station. via NASA https://ift.tt/HBg6L4l

How far can you see? The most distant object easily visible to the unaided eye is M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy, over two million light-years away. Without a telescope, even this immense spiral galaxy appears as an unremarkable, faint, nebulous cloud in the constellation Andromeda. But a bright white nucleus, dark winding dust lanes, luminous […]

This Feb 3, 2023, enhanced-color image from Landsat 9 highlights a green and blue patchwork pattern in flooded rice fields in southwestern Louisiana. via NASA https://ift.tt/h1rqOc4

Can dust be beautiful? Yes, and it can also be useful. The Taurus molecular cloud has several bright stars, but it is the dark dust that really draws attention. The pervasive dust has waves and ripples and makes picturesque dust bunnies, but perhaps more importantly, it marks regions where interstellar gas is dense enough to […]

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, looks quite small in comparison to the giant planet behind it in this natural color view from the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft. via NASA https://ift.tt/y689FUA

Are your eyes good enough to see the Crab Nebula expand? The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first on Charles Messier’s famous list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, an expanding cloud of debris from the explosion of a massive star. […]

To see the feathered serpent descend the Mayan pyramid requires exquisite timing. You must visit El Castillo — in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula — near an equinox. Then, during the late afternoon if the sky is clear, the pyramid’s own shadows create triangles that merge into the famous illusion of a slithering viper. Also known as […]

Driven by powerful stellar winds, expanding shrouds of gas and dust frame hot, luminous star Wolf-Rayet 124 in this sharp infrared view. The eye-catching 6-spike star pattern is characteristic of stellar images made with the 18 hexagonal mirrors of the James Webb Space Telescope. About 15,000 light-years distant toward the pointed northern constellation Sagitta, WR […]

Maat Mons, a volcano on Venus that has shown signs of a recent eruption, is in the black square near the planet’s equator in this annotated, computer-simulated global map of Venus’ surface. via NASA https://ift.tt/Pf6imQe