Legendary actor and diplomat, Sidney Poitier, visited JPL in 1979. via NASA https://ift.tt/31LdlpY

Why does Comet Leonard’s tail wag? The featured time-lapse video shows the ion tail of Comet C/2021 A1 (Leonard) as it changed over ten days early last month. The video was taken by NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory-Ahead (STEREO-A) spacecraft that co-orbits the Sun at roughly the same distance as the Earth. Each image in […]

What will become of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot? Gas giant Jupiter is the solar system’s largest world with about 320 times the mass of planet Earth. Jupiter is home to one of the largest and longest lasting storm systems known, the Great Red Spot (GRS), visible to the left. The GRS is so large it […]

Named for a forgotten constellation, the Quadrantid Meteor Shower puts on an annual show for planet Earth’s northern hemisphere skygazers. The shower’s radiant on the sky lies within the old, astronomically obsolete constellation Quadrans Muralis. That location is not far from the Big Dipper, at the boundaries of the modern constellations Bootes and Draco. In […]

This image shows the James Webb Space Telescope atop its launch vehicle, but before it was encapsulated in the rocket fairing. via NASA https://ift.tt/3f0q9vK

A male Adelie penguin performed this Ecstatic Vocalization in silhouette during the December 4 solar eclipse, the final eclipse of 2021. Of course his Ecstatic Vocalization is a special display that male penguins use to claim their territory and advertise their condition. This penguin’s territory, at Cape Crozier Antarctica, is located in one of the […]

This image shows knots of cold, dense interstellar gas where new stars are forming. via NASA https://ift.tt/3bSWtPy

That’s not a young crescent Moon posing behind cathedral towers after sunset. It’s Venus in a crescent phase. About 40 million kilometers away and about 2 percent illuminated by sunlight, it was captured with camera and telephoto lens in this series of exposures as it set in western skies on January 1 from Veszprem, Hungary. […]

2021 saw significant milestones achieved in the assembly of NASA’s X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology aircraft (QueSST), and all eyes now look forward to a pivotal 2022. via NASA https://ift.tt/3eUKS3W

Does the Sun always rise in the same direction? No. As the months change, the direction toward the rising Sun changes, too. The featured image shows the direction of sunrise every month during 2021 as seen from the city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The camera in the image is always facing due east, with north […]