Why would the sky look like a giant target? Airglow. Following a giant thunderstorm over Bangladesh in late April, giant circular ripples of glowing air appeared over Tibet, China, as pictured here. The unusual pattern is created by atmospheric gravity waves, waves of alternating air pressure that can grow with height as the air thins, […]
When the Artemis 1 mission’s Orion spacecraft makes its November 21 powered flyby of the Moon, denizens of planet Earth will see the Moon in a waning crescent phase. The spacecraft will approach to within about 130 kilometers of the lunar surface on its way to a distant retrograde orbit some 70,000 kilometers beyond the […]
A small, dense cloud of gas and dust called CB 130-3 blots out the center of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. via NASA https://ift.tt/dK9lxVE
The protostar within dark cloud L1527 is a mere 100,000 years old, still embedded in the cloud of gas and dust that feeds its growth. In this NIRCam image from the James Webb Space Telescope, the dark band at the neck of the infrared nebula is a thick disk that surrounds the young stellar object. […]
Stephanie Yazzie, Northern Arizona University student and NAU Space Jacks team member, poses with her team’s rocket in this photo from the 2019 NASA First Nations Launch (FNL) competition. via NASA https://ift.tt/s7SJrHn
A Space Launch System rocket left planet Earth on Wednesday, November 16 at 1:47am EST carrying the Orion spacecraft on the Artemis 1 mission, the first integrated test of NASA’s deep space exploration systems. Over an hour after liftoff from Kennedy Space Center’s historic Launch Complex 39B, one of Orion’s external video cameras captured this […]
Our Space Launch System (SLS), the most powerful rocket in the world, carrying the Orion spacecraft launches on the Artemis I flight test, Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022, from Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 1:47 a.m. EST. via NASA https://ift.tt/l9EiHNe
Spiral galaxy NGC 1097 shines in southern skies, about 45 million light-years away in the heated constellation Fornax. Its blue spiral arms are mottled with pinkish star forming regions in this colorful galaxy portrait. They seem to have wrapped around a small companion galaxy above and right of center, about 40,000 light-years from the spiral’s […]
The Moon is seen rising above NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard at Launch Pad 39B as preparations for launch continue, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. via NASA https://ift.tt/lj1pKeP
The mysterious blue reflection nebula found in catalogs as VdB 152 or Ced 201 really is very faint. It lies at the tip of the long dark nebula Barnard 175 in a dusty complex that has also been called Wolf’s Cave. At the center of this deep telescopic view, the cosmic apparitions are nearly 1,400 […]