Saturn and Jupiter are getting closer. Every night that you go out and check for the next two months, these two bright planets will be even closer together on the sky. Finally, in mid-December, a Great Conjunction will occur — when the two planets will appear only 0.1 degrees apart — just one fifth the […]
This illustration shows the hot, dense, expanding cloud of debris stripped from neutron stars just before they collided. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-7qR
How many famous sky objects can you find in this image? The featured dark sky composite combines over 60 exposures spanning over 220 degrees to create a veritable menagerie of night sky wonders. Visible celestial icons include the Belt of Orion, the Orion Nebula, the Andromeda Galaxy, the California Nebula, and bright stars Sirius and […]
On Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2020, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx sample collection mission performed a successful “Touch-And-Go” (TAG) maneuver. via NASA https://wp.me/p4wJUi-7rp
What strange world is this? Earth. In the foreground of the featured image are the Pinnacles, unusual rock spires in Nambung National Park in Western Australia. Made of ancient sea shells (limestone), how these human-sized picturesque spires formed remains unknown. In the background, just past the end of the central Pinnacle, is a bright crescent […]
How massive can a normal star be? Estimates made from distance, brightness and standard solar models had given one star in the open cluster Pismis 24 over 200 times the mass of our Sun, making it one of the most massive stars known. This star is the brightest object located just above the gas front […]
Deep shadows create dramatic contrasts between light and dark in this high-resolution close-up of the martian surface. Recorded on January 24, 2014 by the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the scene spans about 1.5 kilometers. From 250 kilometers above the Red Planet the camera is looking down at a sand dune field […]
This Hubble Space Telescope image depicts a small section of the Cygnus supernova blast wave, the result of the “death” of a star 20 times more massive than our Sun 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. Light from this supernova takes around 2,400 years to reach Earth. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-7fX
This exciting and unfamiliar view of the Orion Nebula is a visualization based on astronomical data and movie rendering techniques. Up close and personal with a famous stellar nursery normally seen from 1,500 light-years away, the digitally modeled frame transitions from a visible light representation based on Hubble data on the left to infrared data […]
In this large celestial mosaic taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and published in 2019, there’s a lot to see, including multiple clusters of stars born from the same dense clumps of gas and dust. via wordpress https://wp.me/p4wJUi-7fj