What’s happening inside this interstellar mountain? Stars are forming. The mountain is actually a column of gas and dust in the picturesque Eagle Nebula (M16). A pillar like this is so low in density that you could easily fly though it — it only appears solid because of its high dust content and great depth. […]
On the 19th day of the Artemis I mission, Dec. 4, 2022, a camera mounted on the Orion spacecraft captured the Moon just in frame as Orion prepared for its return powered flyby on Dec. 5, when it passed approximately 79 miles above the lunar surface. via NASA https://ift.tt/geqiFm5
Have you ever seen the Pleiades star cluster? Even if you have, you probably have never seen it as large and clear as this. Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the bright stars of the Pleiades can be seen with the unaided eye even from the depths of a light-polluted city. With […]
How different does the universe look on very small scales? On very large scales? The most famous short science film of its generation gives breathtaking comparisons. That film, Powers of Ten, originally created in the 1960s, has been officially posted to YouTube and embedded here. From a picnic blanket near Chicago out past the Virgo […]
Mars looks sharp in these two rooftop telescope views captured in late November from Singapore, planet Earth. At the time, Mars was about 82 million kilometers from Singapore and approaching its opposition, opposite the Sun in planet Earth’s sky on December 8. Olympus Mons, largest of the volcanoes in the Tharsis Montes region (and largest […]
This whole collection is NGC 1858, an open star cluster in the northwest region of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way that boasts an abundance of star-forming regions. NGC 1858 is estimated to be around 10 million years old. via NASA https://ift.tt/JBUONDK
Bright at infrared wavelengths, this merging galaxy pair is some 500 million light-years away toward the constellation Delphinus. The cosmic mashup is seen against a background of even more distant galaxies, and occasional spiky foreground stars. But the galaxy merger itself spans about 100,000 light-years in this deep James Webb Space Telescope image. The image […]
On the sixth day of the Artemis I mission, Nov. 21, 2022, the Orion spacecraft’s optical navigation camera captured black-and-white images of craters on the Moon below. via NASA https://ift.tt/uqd4gDH
On flight day 13 (November 28) of the Artemis 1 mission the Orion spacecraft reached its maximum distance from Earth. In fact, over 430,000 kilometers from Earth its distant retrograde orbit also put Orion nearly 70,000 kilometers from the Moon. In the same field of view in this video frame from flight day 13, planet […]
Vice President Kamala Harris delivers remarks prior to meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson for an Earth Science briefing, Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2022, at the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters building in Washington. via NASA https://ift.tt/Iw46Rxv