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 […]
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