NASA’s OSIRIS-REx is ready for touchdown on asteroid Bennu. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-7aM

Where are all these meteors coming from? In terms of direction on the sky, the pointed answer is the constellation of Perseus. That is why the meteor shower that peaks tomorrow night is known as the Perseids — the meteors all appear to came from a radiant toward Perseus. In terms of parent body, though, […]

The hydrogen in your body, present in every molecule of water, came from the Big Bang. There are no other appreciable sources of hydrogen in the universe. The carbon in your body was made by nuclear fusion in the interior of stars, as was the oxygen. Much of the iron in your body was made […]

From Earth, Saturn never shows a crescent phase. But when viewed from a spacecraft the majestic giant planet can show just a sunlit slice. This image of crescent Saturn in natural color was taken by the robotic Cassini spacecraft in 2007. It captures Saturn’s rings from the side of the ring plane opposite the Sun […]

The barred spiral galaxy known as NGC 4907 shows its starry face from 270 million light-years away to anyone who can see it from the Northern Hemisphere. Appearing in this Hubble image to shine brightly below the galaxy is a star that is actually within our own Milky Way galaxy. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-79x

East of Antares, dark markings sprawl through crowded star fields toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Cataloged in the early 20th century by astronomer E. E. Barnard, the obscuring interstellar dust clouds include B59, B72, B77 and B78, seen in against the starry background. Here, their combined shape suggests a pipe stem and […]

For decades, astronomers have known about irregular outbursts from the double star system V745 Sco, which is located about 25,000 light years from Earth. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-78K

Ancient sun daggers will not hurt you, but they may tell you the time.  A sun dagger is a dagger-shaped gap in a shadow created by sunlight streaming through a crevice in a nearby rock. Starting over a thousand year ago, native people of the American southwest carved spiral petroglyphs into rocks that became illuminated […]

NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover touched down eight years ago, on Aug. 5, 2012, and will soon be joined by a second rover, Perseverance. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-78S

The beautiful Trifid Nebula, also known as Messier 20, is easy to find with a small telescope in the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. About 5,000 light-years away, the colorful study in cosmic contrasts shares this well-composed, nearly 1 degree wide field with open star cluster Messier 21 (right). Trisected by dust lanes the Trifid itself […]