This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the central region of the gigantic elliptical galaxy NGC 474. via NASA https://ift.tt/qXdw1gQ

Cloudy skies plagued some sky watchers on Sunday as May’s Full Flower Moon slipped through Earth’s shadow in a total lunar eclipse. In skies above Chile’s Atacama desert this telephoto snapshot still captured an awesome spectacle though. Seen through thin high cirrus clouds just before totality began, a last sliver of sunlit crescent glistens like […]

Dr. Kartik Sheth’s career spans academia, non-profits, and government. via NASA https://ift.tt/X8CIP0v

Astronomers turn detectives when trying to figure out the cause of startling sights like NGC 1316. Investigations indicate that NGC 1316 is an enormous elliptical galaxy that started, about 100 million years ago, to devour a smaller spiral galaxy neighbor, NGC 1317, just on the upper right. Supporting evidence includes the dark dust lanes characteristic […]

Quesst is what NASA is calling its mission to enable supersonic air travel over land. via NASA https://ift.tt/kSo4NUa

Quesst is what NASA is calling its mission to enable supersonic air travel over land. via NASA https://ift.tt/kSo4NUa

Real castles aren’t this old. And the background galaxy is even older. Looking a bit like an alien castle, the pictured rock spires are called hoodoos and are likely millions of years old. Rare, but found around the world, hoodoos form when dense rocks slow the erosion of softer rock underneath. The pictured hoodoos survive […]

What color is the Moon? It depends on the night. Outside of the Earth’s atmosphere, the dark Moon, which shines by reflected sunlight, appears a magnificently brown-tinged gray. Viewed from inside the Earth’s atmosphere, though, the moon can appear quite different. The featured image highlights a collection of apparent colors of the full moon documented […]

An almost full moon on April 15 brought these luminous apparitions to a northern spring night over Alberta Canada. On that night, bright moonlight refracted and reflected by hexagonal ice crystals in high clouds created a complex of halos and arcs more commonly seen by sunlight in daytime skies. While the colors of the arcs […]

This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image spotlights the giant elliptical galaxy, UGC 10143, at the heart of galaxy cluster, Abell 2147. via NASA https://ift.tt/X4jhzuR