Photo of the Day This was an unusual night. For one thing, the night sky of August 11 and 12, earlier this week, occurred near the peak of the annual Perseid Meteor Shower. Therefore, meteors streaked across the dark night as small bits cast off from Comet Swift-Tuttle came crashing into the Earth's atmosphere. [...]
Photo of the Day What's that on the horizon? When circling the Earth on the International Space Station early last month, astronaut Matthew Dominick saw an unusual type of lightning just beyond the Earth's edge: a gigantic jet. The powerful jet appears on the left of the featured image in red and blue. Giant [...]
Photo of the Day Messier 20, popularly known as the Trifid Nebula, lies about 5,000 light-years away toward the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. A star forming region in the plane of our galaxy, the Trifid does illustrate three different types of astronomical nebulae; red emission nebulae dominated by light from hydrogen atoms, blue reflection [...]
Photo of the Day To some, they look like battlements, here protecting us against the center of the Milky Way. The Three Merlons, also called the Three Peaks of Lavaredo, stand tall today because they are made of dense dolomite rock which has better resisted erosion than surrounding softer rock. They formed about 250 [...]
Photo of the Day What would it look like to return home from outside our galaxy? Although designed to answer greater questions, data from ESA's robotic Gaia mission is helping to provide a uniquely modern perspective on humanity's place in the universe. Gaia orbits the Sun near the Earth and resolves stars' positions so [...]
Photo of the Day A visitor to the inner solar system every 70 years or so Comet 13P/Olbers reached its most recent perihelion, or closest approach to the Sun, on June 30 2024. Now on a return voyage to the distant Oort cloud the Halley-type comet is recorded here sweeping through northern summer night [...]
Photo of the Day What is creating these unusual spots? Light-colored spots on Martian rocks, each surrounded by a dark border, were discovered earlier this month by NASA's Perseverance Rover currently exploring Mars. Dubbed leopard spots because of their seemingly similarity to markings on famous Earth-bound predators, these curious patterns are being studied with [...]
Photo of the Day To some, it looks like a penguin. But to people who study the universe, it is an interesting example of two big galaxies interacting. Just a few hundred million years ago, the upper NGC 2936 was likely a normal spiral galaxy: spinning, creating stars, and minding its own business. Then [...]
Photo of the Day Saturn now rises before midnight in planet Earth's sky. On July 24, the naked-eye planet was in close conjunction, close on the sky, to a waning gibbous Moon. But from some locations on planet Earth the ringed gas giant was occulted, disappearing behind the Moon for about an hour from [...]
Photo of the Day What powers the Crab Nebula? A city-sized magnetized neutron star spinning around 30 times a second. Known as the Crab Pulsar, it is the bright spot in the center of the gaseous swirl at the nebula's core. About 10 light-years across, the spectacular picture of the Crab Nebula (M1) frames [...]
