The aurora borealis glow on the northern horizon while stars wheel overhead in this long exposure, taken near the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah on Nov. 4, 2021. via NASA https://ift.tt/3kbqvlQ
Light-years across, this suggestive shape known as the Seahorse Nebula appears in silhouette against a rich, luminous background of stars. Seen toward the royal northern constellation of Cepheus, the dusty, obscuring clouds are part of a Milky Way molecular cloud some 1,200 light-years distant. It is also listed as Barnard 150 (B150), one of 182 […]
The colorful planetary nebula, NGC 2438, formed after the death of a Sun-like star. It appears to lie on the outskirts of the open star cluster, M46 (NGC 2437), when in fact it is in the foreground between us and the star cluster. via NASA https://ift.tt/3EODcex
Dwarf galaxies NGC 147 (left) and NGC 185 stand side by side in this sharp telescopic portrait. The two are not-often-imaged satellites of M31, the great spiral Andromeda Galaxy, some 2.5 million light-years away. Their separation on the sky, less than one degree across a pretty field of view, translates to only about 35 thousand […]
An artists’ impression of the Mariner 10 mission, the first mission to perform an interplanetary gravity assist. via NASA https://ift.tt/2YfgbBO
The Horsehead Nebula is one of the most famous nebulae on the sky. It is visible as the dark indentation to the orange emission nebula at the far right of the featured picture. The horse-head feature is dark because it is really an opaque dust cloud that lies in front of the bright emission nebula. […]
An aurora dimly intersected with Earth’s airglow as the International Space Station flew into an orbital sunrise 264 miles above the Pacific Ocean. via NASA https://ift.tt/3bB4Crv
We’ve seen this same supernova three times — when will we see it a fourth? When a distant star explodes in a supernova, we’re lucky if we see it even once. In the case of AT 2016jka (“SN Requiem”), because the exploding star happened to be lined up behind the center of a galaxy cluster […]
The dream was to capture both the waterfall and the Milky Way together. Difficulties included finding a good camera location, artificially illuminating the waterfall and the surrounding valley effectively, capturing the entire scene with numerous foreground and background shots, worrying that fireflies would be too distracting, keeping the camera dry, and avoiding stepping on a […]
Is our universe haunted? It might look that way on this dark matter map. The gravity of unseen dark matter is the leading explanation for why galaxies rotate so fast, why galaxies orbit clusters so fast, why gravitational lenses so strongly deflect light, and why visible matter is distributed as it is both in the […]