Astronaut John W. Young, commander of the Apollo 16 lunar landing mission, leaps from the lunar surface as he salutes the United States flag at the Descartes landing site during the first Apollo 16 spacewalk. via NASA https://ift.tt/7cOgyGJ
Ringed, ice giant Neptune lies near the center of this sharp near-infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope. The dim and distant world is the farthest planet from the Sun, about 30 times farther away than planet Earth. But in the stunning Webb view the planet’s dark and ghostly appearance is due to atmospheric […]
Our Shuttle Carrier Aircraft ferries the Space Shuttle Endeavour over the Johnson Space Center in Houston in this Sept. 20, 2012, image. via NASA https://ift.tt/TNqZo8l
Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is often touted as an analog to our own Milky Way. About 50 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Pegasus, NGC 7331 was recognized early on as a spiral nebula and is actually one of the brighter galaxies not included in Charles Messier’s famous 18th century catalog. Since […]
In this March 7, 2022, image, astronaut Frank Rubio gets help putting on a spacesuit at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to train for spacewalks. via NASA https://ift.tt/UCbgvQd
While drifting through the cosmos, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud became sculpted by stellar winds and radiation to assume a recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is embedded in the vast and complex Orion Nebula (M42). A potentially rewarding but difficult object to view personally with a small telescope, the featured gorgeously detailed […]
What’s happening in the Statue of Liberty nebula? Bright stars and interesting molecules are forming and being liberated. The complex nebula resides in the star forming region called RCW 57, and besides the iconic monument, to some looks like a flying superhero or a weeping angel. By digitally removing the stars, this re-assigned color image […]
This cloudy, turbulent scene shows a stellar nursery within the Large Magellanic Cloud known as N159. via NASA https://ift.tt/pZi0ghb
The beauty in this image comes in layers. On the bottom layer is the picturesque village of Manlleu in Barcelona, Spain. The six-minute exposure makes car lights into streaks. The next layer is a mountain — Serra de Bellmunt — of Europe’s famous Pyrenees. Next up is a tremendous lightning storm emanating from a classically-shaped […]
If you went outside at the same time every day and took a picture that included the Sun, how would the Sun’s position change? A more visual answer to that question is an analemma, a composite image taken from the same spot at the same time over the course of a year. The featured analemma […]