This long-exposure photograph captures a starry sky above the Earth’s atmospheric glow. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-792

What would it look like to fly through the distant universe? To find out, a team of astronomers estimated the relative distances to over 5,000 galaxies in one of the most distant fields of galaxies ever imaged: the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF). Because it takes light a long time to cross the universe, most […]

This Comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3) now sweeps through our fair planet’s northern skies. Its long tails stretch across this deep skyview from Suchy Vrch, Czech Republic. Recorded on the night of July 13/14, the composite of untracked foreground and tracked and filtered sky exposures teases out details in the comet’s tail not visible to the […]

The crew snapped this starry nighttime shot of Rio de Janeiro and surrounding cities on the Brazilian coast, as the International Space Station orbited above São Paolo. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-74B

In this image, NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover waits to be lifted onto its Atlas V launch vehicle at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on July 7, 2020. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-73n

Have you ever seen a comet? Tonight — and likely the next few nights — should be a good chance. Go outside just at sunset and look to your northwest. The lower your horizon, the better. Binoculars may help, but if your sky is cloudless and dark, all you should need is your unaided eyes […]

A young star’s unseen, planet-forming disk casts a huge shadow across a more distant cloud in a star-forming region. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-72T

This sight was worth getting out of bed early. Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) has been rising before dawn during the past week to the delight of northern sky enthusiasts awake that early. Up before sunrise, the featured photographer was able to capture in dramatic fashion one of the few comets visible to the unaided eye […]

Where do comet tails come from? There are no obvious places on the nuclei of comets from which the jets that create comet tails emanate. One of the best images of emerging jets is shown in the featured picture, taken in 2015 by ESA’s robotic Rosetta spacecraft that orbited Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (Comet CG) from 2014 […]

Comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3) is now sweeping through northern skies. Its developing tails stretch some six degrees across this telescopic field of view, recorded from Brno, Czech Republic before daybreak on July 10. Pushed out by the pressure of sunlight itself, the comet’s broad, yellowish dust tail is easiest to see. But the image also […]