Northrup Grumman’s Cygnus resupply ship is pictured in the grips of the Canadarm2 robotic arm moments before its release ending its 83-day stay at the International Space Station on May 11, 2020. via NASA https://ift.tt/2Wug1Tk

The pre-dawn hours of May 3rd were moonless as grains of cosmic dust streaked through southern skies above Reunion Island. Swept up as planet Earth plowed through dusty debris streams left behind periodic Comet 1/P Halley, the annual meteor shower is known as the Eta Aquarids. This inspired exposure captures a bright aquarid meteor flashing […]

In infrared, Jupiter lights up the night. Recently, astronomers at the Gemini North Observatory in Hawaii, USA, created some of the best infrared photos of Jupiter ever taken from Earth’surface, pictured. Gemini was able to produce such a clear image using a technique called lucky imaging, by taking many images and combining only the clearest […]

What’s behind Betelgeuse? One of the brighter and more unusual stars in the sky, the red supergiant star Betelgeuse can be found in the direction of famous constellation Orion. Betelgeuse, however, is actually well in front of many of the constellation’s other bright stars, and also in front of the greater Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. […]

Where are all of these meteors coming from? In terms of direction on the sky, the pointed answer is the constellation of Small Harp (Lyra). That is why the famous meteor shower that peaks every April is known as the Lyrids — the meteors all appear to came from a radiant toward Lyra. In terms […]

Several hundred million years ago, two galaxy clusters collided and then passed through each other. via NASA https://ift.tt/2LlhrcC

What’s happening to this spiral galaxy? Just a few hundred million years ago, NGC 2936, the upper of the two large galaxies shown, was likely a normal spiral galaxy — spinning, creating stars — and minding its own business. But then it got too close to the massive elliptical galaxy NGC 2937 below and took […]

You need to be in the south, looking south, to see such a sky. And only then if you’re lucky. Just above the picturesque tree is the impressive Carina Nebula, one of the few nebulas in the sky that is visible to the unaided eye. The featured image had to be taken from a very […]

NASA astronaut Ricky Arnold takes an out of this world “space-selfie” while conducting a spacewalk on March 29, 2018. via NASA https://ift.tt/2YJCzRy

Rising as the Sun set, the Moon was bright and full in planet Earth skies on May 7 and known to some as a Flower Moon. Near the horizon it does seem to take on rose pink hues of reddened sunlight in this reflective twilight scene. In fact one of the brighter Full Moons of […]