In this image from April 10, 2022, sunlight glints off the Atlantic Ocean in this photograph from taken by the crew of the International Space Station. via NASA https://ift.tt/JLUvKYt

The mission was to document night-flying birds — but it ended up also documenting a beautiful sky. The featured wide-angle mosaic was taken over the steppe golden fields in Mértola, Portugal in 2020. From such a dark location, an immediately-evident breathtaking glow arched over the night sky: the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. […]

What’s that approaching? Astronauts on board the International Space Station in 2010 first saw it far in the distance. Soon it enlarged to become a dark silhouette. As it came even closer, the silhouette appeared to be a spaceship. Finally, the object revealed itself to be the Space Shuttle Endeavour, and it soon docked as […]

Taken with a camera fixed to a tripod, many short exposures were aligned with the stars to unveil this beautiful, dark night sky. Captured near the rural village of Albany`a at the northeastern corner of Spain, the three stars of Orion’s belt stretch across top center in the starry frame. Alnitak, the easternmost (left) of […]

NASA helped to create a web-based tool that helps park managers better understand the impact of outdoor lighting and noise on animal species in national parks. via NASA https://ift.tt/x5gqidO

Wind-sharpened rocks known as ventifacts, cover this broad sloping plain in the foot hills of Mount Sharp, Gale crater, Mars. Dubbed gator-back rocks their rugged, scaly appearance is captured in these digitally stitched Mastcam frames from the Curiosity rover on mission sol 3,415 (March 15, 2022). Driving over gator-back rocks before has resulted in damage […]

This artist’s impression is of a supermassive black hole that is inside the dust-shrouded core of a vigorously star-forming “starburst” galaxy. via NASA https://ift.tt/d3aQiBc

Spiral arms seem to swirl around the core of Messier 96 in this colorful, detailed portrait of a beautiful island universe. Of course M96 is a spiral galaxy, and counting the faint arms extending beyond the brighter central region it spans 100 thousand light-years or so. That’s about the size of our own Milky Way. […]

What looks like a red butterfly in space is in reality a nursery for hundreds of baby stars, revealed in this infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. via NASA https://ift.tt/gK3c9iQ

What created Devils Tower? The origin of this extraordinary rock monolith in Wyoming, USA is still debated, with a leading hypothesis holding that it is a hardened lava plume that never reached the surface to become a volcano. In this theory, the lighter rock that once surrounded the dense volcanic neck has now eroded away, […]