Unspeakable beauty and unimaginable bedlam can be found together in the Orion Nebula Arguably the most famous of all astronomy nebulas, the Great Nebula in Orion is an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1500 light-years away. In the featured deep image shown in assigned colors, the part of the nebula’s center known as M43 is […]
Wikipedia picture of the day on July 6, 2020: Mute Swan (Cygnus olor) looking for food in the waves on Lake Windermere. Bowness-on-Windermere, England https://ift.tt/2ZEiMls
Why would clouds form a hexagon on Saturn? Nobody is sure. Originally discovered during the Voyager flybys of Saturn in the 1980s, nobody has ever seen anything like it anywhere else in the Solar System. Acquiring its first sunlit views of far northern Saturn in late 2012, the Cassini spacecraft’s wide-angle camera recorded this stunning, […]
Wikipedia picture of the day on July 5, 2020: Ten Million Mark “Notgeld” banknote from Trier, Germany (1923), designed by Fritz Quant, view of Trier after a copperplate print by Matthäus Merian (1646). https://ift.tt/3gqknlr
A sensitive video camera on a summit of the Vosges mountains in France captured these surprising fireworks above a distant horizon on June 26. Generated over intense thunderstorms, this one about 260 kilometers away, the brief and mysterious flashes have come to be known as red sprites. The transient luminous events are caused by electrical […]
Wikipedia picture of the day on July 4, 2020: Common blue damselflies (Enallagma cyathigerum) mating in Whitecross Green Wood, Buckinghamshire. The composite shows how the female swings her abdomen to initiate pairing. https://ift.tt/2Ax0zOe
Stars are forming in Lynds Dark Nebula (LDN) 1251. About 1,000 light-years away and drifting above the plane of our Milky Way galaxy, the dusty molecular cloud is part of a complex of dark nebulae mapped toward the Cepheus flare region. Across the spectrum, astronomical explorations of the obscuring interstellar clouds reveal energetic shocks and […]
Wikipedia picture of the day on July 3, 2020: Cathedral-Basilica of Mary, Queen of the World, Montreal, Canada. The construction of the cathedral, ordered by Ignace Bourget, began in 1875 in order to replace the former Saint-Jacques Cathedral which had burned in 1852. The building is a scale model of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome […]
The Old Astronomer’s Milky Way arcs through this peaceful northern sky. Against faint, diffuse starlight you can follow dark rifts of interstellar dust clouds stretching from the galaxy’s core. They lead toward bright star Antares at the right, almost due south above the horizon. The brightest beacon in the twilight is Jupiter, though. From the […]
Wikipedia picture of the day on July 2, 2020: Cusheon Lake is the third largest lake of Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada. This picture was taken from a pier on a public beach by Cusheon Lake Road in the early morning, about 2 hours after the sunrise https://ift.tt/38jTNHT