Gusting solar winds and blasts of charged particles from the Sun resulted in several rewarding nights of auroras back in 2014 December, near the peak of the last 11-year solar cycle. The featured image captured dramatic auroras stretching across a sky near the town of Yellowknife in northern Canada. The auroras were so bright that […]
Heading for its closest approach to the Sun or perihelion on December 20, comet C/2017 K2 (PanSTARRS) remains a sight for telescopic observers as it sweeps through planet Earth’s southern hemisphere skies. First time visitor from the remote Oort cloud this comet PanSTARRS sports a greenish coma and whitish dust tail about half a degree […]
In this 20-second exposure from Oct. 5, 2022, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft is launched on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 mission to the International Space Station (ISS). via NASA https://ift.tt/oKLgTvm
At opposition, opposite the Sun in Earth’s sky, late last month Jupiter is also approaching perihelion, the closest point to the Sun in its elliptical orbit, early next year. That makes Jupiter exceptionally close to our fair planet, currently resulting in excellent views of the Solar System’s ruling gas giant. On September 27, this sharp […]
Astronaut Serena Auñón-Chancellor installs samples for the Microgravity Investigation of Cement Solidification (MICS) experiment aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in this image from Nov. 27, 2018. via NASA https://ift.tt/y3lAnce
NGC 4631 is a big beautiful spiral galaxy. Seen edge-on, it lies only 25 million light-years away in the well-trained northern constellation Canes Venatici. The galaxy’s slightly distorted wedge shape suggests to some a cosmic herring and to others its popular moniker, The Whale Galaxy. Either way, it is similar in size to our own […]
Astronaut Nicole Mann sits inside a T-38 trainer jet at Ellington Field in Houston, Texas in this image from Nov. 15, 2018. via NASA https://ift.tt/3eJfDkR
What happens if you crash a spaceship into an asteroid? In the case of NASA’s DART spaceship and the small asteroid Dimorphos, as happened last week, you get quite a plume. The goal of the planned impact was planetary protection — to show that the path of an asteroid can be slightly altered, so that, […]
On September 28, the Landsat 8 satellite passed directly over Ian’s eye as the storm approached southwest Florida. The natural-color image above was acquired by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) at 11:57 a.m. local time (15:57 Universal Time), three hours before the storm made landfall in Caya Costa. via NASA https://ift.tt/ZivmyU7
The whole thing looks like an eagle. A closer look at the Eagle Nebula’s center, however, shows the bright region is actually a window into the center of a larger dark shell of dust. Through this window, a brightly-lit workshop appears where a whole open cluster of stars is being formed. In this cavity tall […]