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Is this one galaxy or two? This question came to light in 1950 when astronomer Arthur Hoag chanced upon this unusual extragalactic object. On the outside is a ring dominated by bright blue stars, while near the center lies a ball of much redder stars that are likely much older. Between the two is a gap that appears almost completely dark. How Hoag's Object formed, including its nearly perfectly round ring of stars and gas, remains unknown. Genesis hypotheses include a galaxy collision billions of years ago and the gravitational effect of a central bar that has since vanished . The featured photo was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and reprocessed using an artificially intelligent de-noising algorithm . Observations in radio waves indicate that Hoag's Object has not accreted a smaller galaxy in the past billion years. Hoag's Object spans about 100,000 light years and lies about 600 million light years away toward the constellation of the Snake ( Serpens

A cosmic dust grain plowing through the upper atmosphere much faster than a falling leaf created this brilliant meteor streak . In a serendipitous moment, the sublime night sky view was captured from the resort island of Capri, in the Bay of Naples, on the evening of February 8. Looking across the bay, the camera faces northeast toward the lights of Naples and surrounding cities. Pointing toward the horizon, the meteor streak by chance ends above the silhouette of Mount Vesuvius. One of planet Earth's most famous volcanos, an eruption of Mount Vesuvius destroyed the city of Pompeii in 79 AD . from NASA https://ift.tt/Ah7B3xd

Heading for its next perihelion passage on April 21, Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks is growing brighter. The greenish coma of this periodic Halley-type comet has become relatively easy to observe in small telescopes. But the bluish ion tail now streaming from the active comet's coma and buffeted by the solar wind, is faint and difficult to follow. Still, in this image stacked exposures made on the night of February 11 reveal the fainter tail's detailed structures. The frame spans over two degrees across a background of faint stars and background galaxies toward the northern constellation Lacerta. Of course Comet 12P's April 21 perihelion passage will be only two weeks after the April 8 total solar eclipse, putting the comet in planet Earth's sky along with a totally eclipsed Sun . from NASA https://ift.tt/jWHmZJk

Shiny NGC 253 is one of the brightest spiral galaxies visible, and also one of the dustiest. Some call it the Silver Coin Galaxy for its appearance in small telescopes, or just the Sculptor Galaxy for its location within the boundaries of the southern constellation Sculptor. Discovered in 1783 by mathematician and astronomer Caroline Herschel , the dusty island universe lies a mere 10 million light-years away. About 70 thousand light-years across, NGC 253 is the largest member of the Sculptor Group of Galaxies , the nearest to our own Local Group of Galaxies . In addition to its spiral dust lanes, tendrils of dust seem to be rising from its galactic disk laced with young star clusters and star forming regions in this colorful galaxy portrait . The high dust content accompanies frantic star formation, earning NGC 253 the designation of a starburst galaxy . NGC 253 is also known to be a strong source of high-energy x-rays and gamma rays , likely due to massive black holes near the g

Can you find the Rosette Nebula? The large, red , and flowery-looking nebula on the upper left may seem the obvious choice, but that is actually just diffuse hydrogen emission surrounding the Cone and Fox Fur Nebulas . The famous Rosette Nebula is really located on the lower right and connected to the other nebulas by irregular filaments. Because the featured image of Rosetta's field is so wide and deep , it seems to contain other flowers. Designated NGC 2237 , the center of the Rosette nebula is populated by the bright blue stars of open cluster NGC 2244 , whose winds and energetic light are evacuating the nebula's center. The Rosette Nebula is about 5,000 light years distant and, just by itself, spans about three times the diameter of a full moon . This flowery field can be found toward the constellation of the Unicorn ( Monoceros ). from NASA https://ift.tt/WFfGw3u

Did you see the full moon last month? During every month, on average, a full moon occurs in the skies over planet Earth . This is because the Moon takes a month to complete another orbit around our home planet , goes through all of its phases , and once again has its entire Earth-facing half lit by reflected sunlight. Many indigenous cultures give each full moon a name , and this past full moon's names include the Ice Moon, the Stay at Home Moon, and the Quiet Moon. Occurring in January on the modern western calendar , several cultures have also named the most recent full moon the Wolf Moon , in honor of the famous howling animal . Featured here above the Italian Alps mountains, this past Wolf Moon was captured in combined long and short exposure images. The image is striking because, to some, the surrounding clouds appear as a wolf's mouth ready to swallow the Wolf Moon , while others see the Moon as a wolf's eye. from NASA https://ift.tt/cwS1Qxl

Planetary nebulae like Heckathorn-Fesen-Gull 1 (HFG1) and Abell 6 in the constellation Cassiopeia are remnants from the last phase of a medium sized star like our Sun . In spite of their shapes, planetary nebulae have nothing in common with actual planets . Located in the bottom left part of the featured photo , HFG1 was created by the binary star system V664 Cas, which consists of a white dwarf star and a red giant star . Both stars orbit their center of mass over about half an Earth day . Traveling with the entire nebula at a speed about 300 times faster than the fastest train on Earth, V664 Cas generates a bluish arc shaped shock wave . The wave interacts most strongly with the surrounding interstellar medium in the areas where the arc is brightest. After roughly 10,000 years , planetary nebulae become invisible due to a lack of ultraviolet light being emitted by the star s that create them. Displaying beautiful shapes and structures, planetary nebulae are highly desire

Why would the shadow of a rocket's launch plume point toward the Moon? In early 2001 during a launch of the space shuttle Atlantis , the Sun , Earth , Moon , and rocket were all properly aligned for this photogenic coincidence . First, for the space shuttle 's plume to cast a long shadow, the time of day must be either near sunrise or sunset . Only then will the shadow be its longest and extend all the way to the horizon . Finally, during a Full Moon , the Sun and Moon are on opposite sides of the sky. Just after sunset , for example, the Sun is slightly below the horizon , and, in the other direction, the Moon is slightly above the horizon . Therefore, as Atlantis blasted off, just after sunset , its shadow projected away from the Sun toward the opposite horizon , where the Full Moon happened to be. from NASA https://ift.tt/J86IRWM

On January 18, 2024 , during its 72nd flight in the thin Martian atmosphere, autonomous Mars Helicopter Ingenuity rose to an altitude of 12 meters (40 feet) and hovered for 4.5 seconds above the Red Planet. Ingenuity's 72nd landing was a rough one though. During descent it lost contact with the Perseverance rover about 1 meter above the Martian surface. Ingenuity was able to transmit this image after contact was re-established, showing the shadow of one of its rotor blades likely damaged during landing. And so, after wildly exceeding expectations during over 1,000 days of exploring Mars, the history-making Ingenuity has ended its flight operations. Nicknamed Ginny, Mars Helicopter Ingenuity became the first aircraft to achieve powered, controlled flight on another planet on April 19, 2021 . Before launch, a small piece of material from the lower-left wing of the Wright Brothers Flyer 1, the first aircraft to achieve powered, controlled flight on planet Earth, was fixed to the

Not all roses are red of course , but they can still be very pretty. Likewise, the beautiful Rosette Nebula and other star forming regions are often shown in astronomical images with a predominately red hue, in part because the dominant emission in the nebula is from hydrogen atoms . Hydrogen's strongest optical emission line, known as H-alpha, is in the red region of the spectrum. But the beauty of an emission nebula need not be appreciated in red light alone. Other atoms in the nebula are also excited by energetic starlight and produce narrow emission lines as well. In this close-up view of the Rosette Nebula, narrowband images are mapped into broadband colors to show emission from Sulfur atoms in red, Hydrogen in green, and Oxygen in blue. In fact, the scheme of mapping these narrow atomic emission lines (SHO) into the broader colors (RGB) is adopted in many Hubble images of emission nebulae. This image spans about 50 light-years across the center of the Rosette Nebula . Th

Are these two galaxies really attracted to each other? Yes, gravitationally , and the result appears as an enormous iconic heart -- at least for now. Pictured is the pair of galaxies cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039,known as the Antennae Galaxies . Because they are only 60 million light years away, close by intergalactic standards , the pair is one of the best studied interacting galaxies on the night sky. Their strong attraction began about a billion years ago when they passed unusually close to each other. As the two galaxies interact, their stars rarely collide, but new stars are formed when their interstellar gases crash together. Some new stars have already formed, for example, in the long antennae seen extending out from the sides of the dancing duo. By the time the galaxy merger is complete, likely over a billion years from now , billions of new stars may have formed. from NASA https://ift.tt/RZUzmqW

What's different about this galaxy? Very little, which makes the Spanish Dancer galaxy , NGC 1566 , one of the most typical and photogenic spirals on the sky. There is something different about this galaxy image , though, because it is a diagonal combination of two images: one by the Hubble Space Telescope on the upper left, and the other by the James Webb Space Telescope on the lower right. The Hubble image was taken in ultraviolet light and highlights the locations of bright blue stars and dark dust along the galaxy's impressive spiral arms. In contrast, the Webb image was taken in infrared light and highlights where the same dust emits more light than it absorbed. In the rollover image, the other two sides of these images are revealed. Blinking between the two images shows which stars are particularly hot because they glow brighter in ultraviolet light, and the difference between seemingly empty space and infrared-glowing dust. from NASA https://ift.tt/gFBdbAN

What's happening in the core of the Carina Nebula? Stars are forming, dying, and leaving an impressive tapestry of dark dusty filaments. The entire Carina Nebula , cataloged as NGC 3372, spans over 300 light years and lies about 8,500 light-years away in the constellation of Carina. The nebula is composed predominantly of hydrogen gas, which emits the pervasive red and orange glows seen mostly in the center of this highly detailed featured image . The blue glow around the edges is created primarily by a trace amount of glowing oxygen . Young and massive stars located in the nebula's center expel dust when they explode in supernovas. Eta Carinae , the most energetic star in the nebula's center, was one of the brightest stars in the sky in the 1830s, but then faded dramatically . from NASA https://ift.tt/bh7E1f4

Stars are forming in the gigantic dust pillar called the Cone Nebula. Cones, pillars , and majestic flowing shapes abound in stellar nurseries where natal clouds of gas and dust are buffeted by energetic winds from newborn stars. The Cone Nebula , a well-known example, lies within the bright galactic star-forming region NGC 2264 . The Cone was captured in unprecedented detail in this close-up composite of several observations from the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope . While the Cone Nebula , about 2,500 light-year s away in Monoceros , is around 7 light-years long, the region pictured here surrounding the cone's blunted head is a mere 2.5 light-years across. In our neck of the galaxy that distance is just over half way from our Sun to its nearest stellar neighbors in the Alpha Centauri star system. The massive star NGC 2264 IRS , seen by Hubble's infrared camera in 1997, is the likely source of the wind sculpting the Cone Nebula and lies off the top of the image

Apollo 14's Lunar Module Antares landed on the Moon on February 5, 1971. Toward the end of the stay astronaut Ed Mitchell snapped a series of photos of the lunar surface while looking out a window, assembled into this detailed mosaic by Apollo Lunar Surface Journal editor Eric Jones. The view looks across the Fra Mauro highlands to the northwest of the landing site after the Apollo 14 astronauts had completed their second and final walk on the Moon . Prominent in the foreground is their Modular Equipment Transporter, a two-wheeled, rickshaw-like device used to carry tools and samples. Near the horizon at top center is a 1.5 meter wide boulder dubbed Turtle rock. In the shallow crater below Turtle rock is the long white handle of a sampling instrument, thrown there javelin-style by Mitchell. Mitchell's fellow moonwalker and first American in space, Alan Shepard , also used a makeshift six iron to hit two golf balls . One of Shepard's golf balls is just visible as a wh

This cosmic view shows off an otherwise faint emission nebula IC 410, captured under clear Netherlands skies with telescope and narrowband filters. Above and right of center you can spot two remarkable inhabitants of the interstellar pond of gas and dust, known as the tadpoles of IC 410. Partly obscured by foreground dust, the nebula itself surrounds NGC 1893, a young galactic cluster of stars. Formed in the interstellar cloud a mere 4 million years ago, the intensely hot, bright cluster stars energize the glowing gas. Globules composed of denser cooler gas and dust, the tadpoles are around 10 light-years long and are likely sites of ongoing star formation . Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation their heads are outlined by bright ridges of ionized gas while their tails trail away from the cluster's central young stars. IC 410 and embedded NGC 1893 lie some 10,000 light-years away, toward the nebula-rich constellation Auriga . from NASA https://ift.tt/oyEtDmw

Barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 is truly a majestic island universe some 200,000 light-years across. Located a mere 60 million light-years away toward the faint but heated constellation Fornax , NGC 1365 is a dominant member of the well-studied Fornax Cluster of galaxies. This sharp color image shows the intense, reddish star forming regions near the ends of the galaxy's central bar and along its spiral arms. Seen in fine detail, obscuring dust lanes cut across the galaxy's bright core. At the core lies a supermassive black hole. Astronomers think NGC 1365's prominent bar plays a crucial role in the galaxy's evolution, drawing gas and dust into a star-forming maelstrom and ultimately feeding material into the central black hole . from NASA https://ift.tt/A0ESVno

What does Orion rising look like to a camera? During this time of the year, the famous constellation is visible to the southeast just after sunset. From most Earth ly locations, Orion's familiar star pattern , highlighted by the three-stars-in-a-row belt stars, rises sideways . An entire section of the night sky that includes Orion was photographed rising above Śnieżka , a mountain on the border between Poland and the Czech Republic . The long duration exposure sequence brings up many faint features including the Orion and Flame Nebulas, both encompassed by the curving Barnard's Loop . The featured wide-angle camera composite also captured night sky icons including the blue Pleiades star cluster at the image top and the red Rosette Nebula to the left of Orion. Famous stars in the frame include Sirius , Betelgeuse , Rigel and Aldebaran . Orion will appear successively higher in the sky at sunset during the coming months. from NASA https://ift.tt/lvN5zh0

New landers are on the Moon. Nearly two weeks ago, Japan 's Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) released two rovers as it descended, before its main lander touched down itself. The larger of the two rovers can hop like a frog , while the smaller rover is about the size of a baseball and can move after pulling itself apart like a transformer . The main lander, nicknamed Moon Sniper, is seen in the featured image taken by the smaller rover. Inspection of the image shows that Moon Sniper 's thrusters are facing up, meaning that the lander is upside down from its descent configuration and on its side from its intended landing configuration . One result is that Moon Sniper 's solar panel s are not in the expected orientation , so that powering the lander had to be curtailed and adapted. SLIM 's lander has already succeeded as a technology demonstration , its main mission, but was not designed to withstand the lunar night -- which starts tomorrow . from NASA h

The well-known Pleiades star cluster is slowly destroying part of a passing cloud of gas and dust. The Pleiades is the brightest open cluster of stars on Earth's sky and can be seen from almost any northerly location with the unaided eye . Over the past 100,000 years, a field of gas and dust is moving by chance right through the Pleiades star cluster and is causing a strong reaction between the stars and dust. The passing cloud might be part of the Radcliffe wave , a newly discovered structure of gas and dust connecting several regions of star formation in the nearby part of our Milky Way galaxy . Pressure from the stars' light significantly repels the dust in the surrounding blue reflection nebula , with smaller dust particles being repelled more strongly. A short-term result is that parts of the dust cloud have become filamentary and stratified . The featured deep image incorporates nearly 9 hours of exposure and was captured from Utah Desert Remote Observatory in

What color is Pluto, really? It took some effort to figure out. Even given all of the images sent back to Earth when the robotic New Horizons spacecraft sped past Pluto in 2015, processing these multi-spectral frames to approximate what the human eye would see was challenging. The result featured here , released three years after the raw data was acquired by New Horizons , is the highest resolution true color image of Pluto ever taken. Visible in the image is the light-colored, heart-shaped, Tombaugh Regio , with the unexpectedly smooth Sputnik Planitia , made of frozen nitrogen , filling its western lobe. New Horizons found the dwarf planet to have a surprisingly complex surface composed of many regions having perceptibly different hues . In total, though, Pluto is mostly brown , with much of its muted color originating from small amounts of surface methane energized by ultraviolet light from the Sun. from NASA https://ift.tt/BjVq1wY

A popular name for January's full moon in the northern hemisphere is the Full Wolf Moon. As the new year's first full moon, it rises over Las Campanas Observatory in this dramatic Earth-and-moonscape . Peering from the foreground like astronomical eyes are the observatory's twin 6.5 meter diameter Magellan telescopes. The snapshot was captured with telephoto lens across rugged terrain in the Chilean Atacama Desert, taken at a distance of about 9 miles from the observatory and about 240,000 miles from the lunar surface . Of course the first full moon of the lunar new year , known to some as the Full Snow Moon, will rise on February 24. from NASA https://ift.tt/6vrQsHG

Epsilon Tauri lies 146 light-years away. A K-type red giant star, epsilon Tau is cooler than the Sun, but with about 13 times the solar radius it has nearly 100 times the solar luminosity. A member of the Hyades open star cluster the giant star is known by the proper name Ain , and along with brighter giant star Aldebaran, forms the eyes of Taurus the Bull. Surrounded by dusty, dark clouds in Taurus, epsilon Tau is also known to have a planet. Discovered by radial velocity measurements in 2006, Epsilon Tauri b is a gas giant planet larger than Jupiter with an orbital period of 1.6 years. And though the exoplanet can't be seen directly, on a dark night its parent star epsilon Tauri is easily visible to the unaided eye. from NASA https://ift.tt/qrQbnuN

You might not immediately recognize this street map of a neighborhood in Jyväskylä , Finland, planet Earth . But that's probably because the map was projected into the night sky and captured with an allsky camera on January 16. The temperature recorded on that northern winter night was around minus 20 degrees Celsius. As ice crystals formed in the atmosphere overhead, street lights spilling illumination into the sky above produced visible light pillars , their ethereal appearance due to specular reflections from the fluttering crystals' flat surfaces. Of course, the projected light pillars trace a map of the brightly lit local streets, though reversed right to left in the upward looking camera's view. This light pillar street map was seen to hover for hours in the Jyväskylä night . from NASA https://ift.tt/bHeC38n

What do the Earth and Moon look like from beyond the Moon? Although frequently photographed together , the familiar duo was captured with this unusual perspective in late 2022 by the robotic Orion spacecraft of NASA 's Artemis I mission as it looped around Earth's most massive satellite and looked back toward its home world. Since our Earth is about four times the diameter of the Moon , the satellite’s seemingly large size was caused by the capsule being closer to the smaller body. Artemis II , the next launch in NASA’s Artemis series, is currently scheduled to take people around the Moon in 2025, while Artemis III is planned to return humans to lunar surface in late 2026. Last week, JAXA 's robotic SLIM spacecraft , launched from Japan , landed on the Moon and released two hopping rovers. from NASA https://ift.tt/dSuaNWi

How well do you know the night sky? OK, but how well can you identify famous sky objects in a very deep image? Either way, here is a test: see if you can find some well-known night-sky icons in a deep image filled with faint nebulosity. This image contains the Pleiades star cluster , Barnard's Loop , Horsehead Nebula , Orion Nebula , Rosette Nebula , Cone Nebula , Rigel , Jellyfish Nebula , Monkey Head Nebula , Flaming Star Nebula , Tadpole Nebula , Aldebaran , Simeis 147 , Seagull Nebula and the California Nebula . To find their real locations, here is an annotated image version . The reason this task might be difficult is similar to the reason it is initially hard to identify familiar constellations in a very dark sky : the tapestry of our night sky has an extremely deep hidden complexity . The featured composite reveals some of this complexity in a mosaic of 28 images taken over 800 hours from dark skies over Arizona , USA . from NASA https://ift.tt/Lt97WJM

Can the Moon and a mountain really cast similar shadows? Yes, but the division between light and dark does not have to be aligned. Pictured, a quarter moon was captured above the mountain Grivola in Italy in early October of 2022. The Sun is to the right of the featured picturesque landscape , illuminating the right side of the Moon in a similar way that it illuminates the right side of the mountain. This lunar phase is called " quarter " because the lit fraction visible from Earth is one quarter of the entire lunar surface. Digital post-processing of this single exposure gave both gigantic objects more prominence. Capturing the terminator of this quarter moon in close alignment with nearly vertical mountain ridge required careful timing because the Earth rotates once a day. from NASA https://ift.tt/R7DXSMd

Yes, but can your blizzard do this? In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan 's Storm of the Century in 1938, some snow drifts reached the level of utility poles . Nearly a meter of new and unexpected snow fell over two days in a storm that started 86 years ago this week. As snow fell and gale-force winds piled snow to surreal heights , many roads became not only impassable but unplowable; people became stranded, cars, school buses and a train became mired, and even a dangerous fire raged . Two people were killed and some student s were forced to spend several consecutive days at school. The featured image was taken by a local resident soon after the storm . Although all of this snow eventually melted , repeated snow storms like this help build lasting glaciers in snowy regions of our planet Earth . from NASA https://ift.tt/UXeBG19

The December 28 night launch of a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida marked the fifth launch for the rocket's reusable side boosters. About 2 minutes 20 seconds into the flight, the two side boosters separated from the rocket's core stage. Starting just after booster separation, this three minute long exposure captures the pair's remarkable boostback burns , maneuvers executed prior to their return to landing zones on planet Earth. While no attempt was made to recover the Falcon Heavy's core stage, both side boosters landed successfully and can be flown again . The four previous flights for these side boosters included last October's launch of NASA's asteroid-bound Psyche mission . from NASA https://ift.tt/z3gaBKU

Jupiter, our Solar System's ruling gas giant, is also the fastest spinning planet , rotating once in less than 10 hours. The gas giant doesn't rotate like a solid body though. A day on Jupiter is about 9 hours and 56 minutes long at the poles, decreasing to 9 hours and 50 minutes near the equator. The giant planet's fast rotation creates strong jet streams , separating its clouds into planet girdling bands of dark belts and bright zones. You can easily follow Jupiter's rapid rotation in this sharp sequence of images from the night of January 15, all taken with a camera and small telescope outside of Paris, France. Located just south of the equator, the giant planet's giant storm system, also known as the Great Red Spot , can be seen moving left to right with the planet's rotation. From lower left to upper right, the sequence spans about 2 hours and 30 minutes. from NASA https://ift.tt/8TyqtKs

Northern lights shine in this night skyview from planet Earth's stratosphere, captured on January 15. The single, 5 second exposure was made with a hand-held camera on board an aircraft above Winnipeg, Canada. During the exposure, terrestrial lights below leave colorful trails along the direction of motion of the speeding aircraft. Above the more distant horizon, energetic particles accelerated along Earth's magnetic field at the planet's polar regions excite atomic oxygen to create the shimmering display of Aurora Borealis . The aurora's characteristic greenish hue is generated at altitudes of 100-300 kilometers and red at even higher altitudes and lower atmospheric densities. The luminous glow of faint stars along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy arcs through the night, while the Andromeda galaxy extends this northern skyview to extragalactic space. A diffuse hint of Andromeda, the closest large spiral to the Milky Way, can just be seen to the upper left. fro

Get out your red/blue glasses and check out this stereo view of another world. The scene was recorded by Apollo 17 mission commander Eugene Cernan on December 11, 1972, one orbit before descending to land on the Moon. The stereo anaglyph was assembled from two photographs ( AS17-147-22465, AS17-147-22466 ) captured from his vantage point on board the Lunar Module Challenger as he and Dr. Harrison Schmitt flew over Apollo 17's landing site in the Taurus-Littrow Valley . The broad, sunlit face of the mountain dubbed South Massif rises near the center of the frame , above the dark floor of Taurus-Littrow to its left. Piloted by Ron Evans, the Command Module America is visible in orbit in the foreground against the South Massif's peak . Beyond the mountains, toward the lunar limb, lies the Moon's Mare Serenitatis . Four astronauts will venture around the Moon and back again on the Artemis II mission , scheduled for launch no earlier than September 2025. from NASA https:/

Do you recognize this constellation? Although it is one of the most recognizable star groupings on the sky, this is a more full Orion than you can see -- an Orion only revealed with long exposure digital camera imaging and post - processing . Here the cool red giant Betelgeuse takes on a strong orange tint as the brightest star on the upper left. Orion 's hot blue stars are numerous, with supergiant Rigel balancing Betelgeuse on the lower right, and Bellatrix at the upper right. Lined up in Orion's belt are three stars all about 1,500 light-years away, born from the constellation's well-studied interstellar clouds . Just below Orion's belt is a bright but fuzzy patch that might also look familiar -- the stellar nursery known as Orion's Nebula . Finally, just barely visible to the unaided eye but quite striking here is Barnard's Loop -- a huge gaseous emission nebula surrounding Orion's Belt and Nebula discovered over 100 years ago by the pion

Sometimes, it's the stars that are the hardest to see that are the most interesting. IC 348 is a young star cluster that illuminates surrounding filamentary dust. The stringy and winding dust appears pink in this recently released infrared image from the Webb Space Telescope . In visible light , this dust reflects mostly blue light, giving the surrounding material the familiar blue hue of a reflection nebula. Besides bright stars, several cool objects have been located in IC 348, visible because they glow brighter in infrared light . These objects are hypothesized to be low mass brown dwarfs . Evidence for this includes the detection of an unidentified atmospheric chemical, likely a hydrocarbon, seen previously in the atmosphere of Saturn . These objects appear to have masses slightly greater than known planets, only a few times greater than Jupiter . Together, these indicate that this young star cluster contains something noteworthy -- young planet-mass brown dwarfs that

Have you ever seen a dragon in the sky? Although real flying dragons don't exist, a huge dragon-shaped aurora developed in the sky over Iceland in 2019 . The aurora was caused by a hole in the Sun's corona that expelled charged particles into a solar wind that followed a changing interplanetary magnetic field to Earth's magnetosphere . As some of those particles then struck Earth's atmosphere , they excited atoms which subsequently emitted light: aurora. This iconic display was so enthralling that the photographer's mother ran out to see it and was captured in the foreground. Our active Sun continues to show an unusually high number of prominences , filaments , sunspots , and large active regions as solar maximum approaches in 2025. from NASA https://ift.tt/CKuVv3F

Earth's orbit around the Sun is not a circle, it's an ellipse. The point along its elliptical orbit where our fair planet is closest to the Sun is called perihelion. This year, perihelion was on January 2 at 01:00 UTC, with the Earth about 3 million miles closer to the Sun than it was at aphelion (last July 6), the farthest point in its elliptical orbit. Of course, distance from the Sun doesn't determine the seasons , and it doesn't the determine size of Sun halos. Easier to see with the Sun hidden behind a tall tree trunk, this beautiful ice halo forms a 22 degree-wide circle around the Sun, recorded while strolling through the countryside near Heroldstatt, Germany. The Sun halo's 22 degree angular diameter is determined by the six-sided geometry of water ice crystals drifting high in planet Earth's atmosphere. from NASA https://ift.tt/7nbfzGq

Yesterday, the Moon was New . But on January 9, early morning risers around planet Earth were treated to the sight of an old Moon, low in the east as the sky grew bright before dawn . Above the city of Saarburg in Rhineland-Palatinate, western Germany, this simple snapshot found the waning Moon's sunlit crescent just before sunrise. But also never wandering far from the Sun in Earth's sky , inner planets Venus and Mercury shared the cold morning skyview . In the foreground are the historic city's tower and castle with ruins from the 10th century. from NASA https://ift.tt/OyWrSHE

Named for a forgotten constellation , the Quadrantid Meteor Shower puts on an annual show for planet Earth's northern hemisphere skygazers. The shower's radiant on the sky lies within the old, astronomically obsolete constellation Quadrans Muralis . That location is not far from the Big Dipper asterism, known to some as the Plough , at the boundaries of the modern constellations Bootes and Draco. In fact the Big Dipper "handle" stars are near the upper right corner in this frame, with the meteor shower radiant just below. North star Polaris is toward the top left. Pointing back toward the radiant, Quadrantid meteors streak through the night in this skyscape from Jangsu, South Korea. The composite image was recorded in the hours around the shower's peak on January 4, 2024. A likely source of the dust stream that produces Quadrantid meteors was identified in 2003 as an asteroid . from NASA https://ift.tt/9VwLlcQ

This colorful skyscape spans about three full moons across nebula rich starfields along the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy toward the royal northern constellation Cepheus . Near the edge of the region's massive molecular cloud some 2,400 light-years away, bright reddish emission region Sharpless (Sh)2-155 is at the center of the frame, also known as the Cave Nebula . About 10 light-years across the cosmic cave's bright walls of gas are ionized by ultraviolet light from the hot young stars around it. Dusty bluish reflection nebulae, like vdB 155 at the left, and dense obscuring clouds of dust also abound on the interstellar canvas. Astronomical explorations have revealed other dramatic signs of star formation , including the bright reddish fleck of Herbig-Haro (HH) 168. At the upper left in the frame, the Herbig-Haro object emission is generated by energetic jets from a newborn star . from NASA https://ift.tt/67ASNCQ

Thor not only has his own day (Thursday), but a helmet in the heavens. Popularly called Thor's Helmet, NGC 2359 is a hat-shaped cosmic cloud with wing-like appendages. Heroically sized even for a Norse god , Thor's Helmet is about 30 light-years across. In fact, the cosmic head-covering is more like an interstellar bubble , blown with a fast wind from the bright, massive star near the bubble's center. Known as a Wolf-Rayet star , the central star is an extremely hot giant thought to be in a brief, pre- supernova stage of evolution . NGC 2359 is located about 15,000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Great Overdog . This remarkably sharp image is a mixed cocktail of data from narrowband filters , capturing not only natural looking stars but details of the nebula's filamentary structures. The star in the center of Thor's Helmet is expected to explode in a spectacular supernova sometime within the next few thousand years. from NASA https://

Venus goes through phases . Just like our Moon, Venus can appear as a full circular disk, a thin crescent , or anything in between. Venus, frequently the brightest object in the post-sunset or pre-sunrise sky, appears so small, however, that it usually requires binoculars or a small telescope to clearly see its current phase. The featured time-lapse sequence was taken over the course of six months in 2015 from Surgères, Charente-Maritime , France , and shows not only how Venus changes phase, but changes angular size as well. When Venus is on the far side of the Sun from the Earth, it appears angularly smallest and nearest to full phase, while when Venus and Earth are on the same side of the Sun, Venus appears larger, but as a crescent. This month Venus rises before dawn in waxing gibbous phases . from NASA https://ift.tt/Cm8h9iD

To some it looks like a cat's eye. To others, perhaps like a giant cosmic conch shell . It is actually one of the brightest and most highly detailed planetary nebula known, composed of gas expelled in the brief yet glorious phase near the end of life of a Sun-like star. This nebula 's dying central star may have produced the outer circular concentric shells by shrugging off outer layers in a series of regular convulsions. The formation of the beautiful, complex-yet-symmetric inner structures , however, is not well understood . The featured image is a composite of a digitally sharpened Hubble Space Telescope image with X-ray light captured by the orbiting Chandra Observatory . The exquisite floating space statue spans over half a light-year across. Of course, gazing into this Cat's Eye , humanity may well be seeing the fate of our sun, destined to enter its own planetary nebula phase of evolution ... in about 5 billion years . from NASA https://ift.tt/Np6vqhf

You couldn't really be caught in this blizzard while standing by a cliff on periodic comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko . Orbiting the comet in June of 2016, the Rosetta spacecraft's narrow angle camera did record streaks of dust and ice particles similar to snow as they drifted across the field of view close to the camera and above the comet's surface. Still, some of the bright specks in the scene are likely due to a rain of energetic charged particles or cosmic rays hitting the camera, and the dense background of stars in the direction of the constellation of the Big Dog ( Canis Major ). In the video , the background stars are easy to spot trailing from top to bottom. The stunning movie was constructed from 33 consecutive images taken over 25 minutes while Rosetta cruised some 13 kilometers from the comet's nucleus . In September 2016, the nucleus became the final resting place for the Rosetta spacecraft after its mission was ended with a successful controlled impa

Near the center of this sharp cosmic portrait, at the heart of the Orion Nebula , are four hot, massive stars known as the Trapezium . Gathered within a region about 1.5 light-years in radius, they dominate the core of the dense Orion Nebula Star Cluster. Ultraviolet ionizing radiation from the Trapezium stars , mostly from the brightest star Theta-1 Orionis C powers the complex star forming region's entire visible glow. About three million years old, the Orion Nebula Cluster was even more compact in its younger years and a dynamical study indicates that runaway stellar collisions at an earlier age may have formed a black hole with more than 100 times the mass of the Sun. The presence of a black hole within the cluster could explain the observed high velocities of the Trapezium stars . The Orion Nebula's distance of some 1,500 light-years would make it one of the closest known black holes to planet Earth. from NASA https://ift.tt/e7TLfxE

Like a ship plowing through cosmic seas, runaway star Zeta Ophiuchi produces the arcing interstellar bow wave or bow shock seen in this stunning infrared portrait. In the false-color view, bluish Zeta Oph, a star about 20 times more massive than the Sun, lies near the center of the frame, moving toward the left at 24 kilometers per second . Its strong stellar wind precedes it, compressing and heating the dusty interstellar material and shaping the curved shock front. What set this star in motion? Zeta Oph was likely once a member of a binary star system , its companion star was more massive and hence shorter lived. When the companion exploded as a supernova catastrophically losing mass, Zeta Oph was flung out of the system. About 460 light-years away, Zeta Oph is 65,000 times more luminous than the Sun and would be one of the brighter stars in the sky if it weren't surrounded by obscuring dust . The image spans about 1.5 degrees or 12 light-years at the estimated distance of

What is that unusual red halo surrounding this aurora? It is a Stable Auroral Red (SAR) arc. SAR arc s are rare and have only been acknowledged and studied since 1954. The featured wide-angle photograph , capturing nearly an entire SAR arc surrounding more common green and red aurora, was taken earlier this month from Poolburn , New Zealand , during an especially energetic geomagnetic storm . Why SAR arcs form remains a topic of research , but is likely related to Earth's protective magnetic field , a field created by molten iron flowing deep inside the Earth . This magnetic field usually redirects incoming charged particles from the Sun's wind toward the Earth's poles. However, it also traps a ring of ions closer to the equator, where they can gain energy from the magnetosphere during high solar activity . The energetic electrons in this ion ring can collide with and excite oxygen higher in Earth's ionosphere than typical auroras , causing the oxygen to glow r

Can a rocket make the Moon ripple? No, but it can make a background moon appear wavy . The rocket, in this case, was a SpaceX Falcon Heavy that blasted off from NASA 's Kennedy Space Center last week. In the featured launch picture , the rocket's exhaust plume glows beyond its projection onto the distant, rising, and nearly full moon. Oddly, the Moon's lower edge shows unusual drip-like ripples . The Moon itself , far in the distance, was really unchanged. The physical cause of these apparent ripples was pockets of relatively hot or rarefied air deflecting moonlight less strongly than pockets of relatively cool or compressed air: refraction . Although the shot was planned , the timing of the launch had to be just right for the rocket to be transiting the Moon during this single exposure. from NASA https://ift.tt/LkQAHTb

Galaxies are fascinating not only for what is visible, but for what is invisible. Grand spiral galaxy NGC 1232 , captured in detail by one of the Very Large Telescopes , is a good example. The visible is dominated by millions of bright stars and dark dust , caught up in a gravitational swirl of spiral arms revolving about the center. Open clusters containing bright blue stars can be seen sprinkled along these spiral arms, while dark lanes of dense interstellar dust can be seen sprinkled between them. Less visible , but detectable, are billions of dim normal stars and vast tracts of interstellar gas , together wielding such high mass that they dominate the dynamics of the inner galaxy . Leading theories indicate that even greater amounts of matter are invisible, in a form we don't yet know. This pervasive dark matter is postulated, in part, to explain the motions of the visible matter in the outer regions of galaxies. from NASA https://ift.tt/6yjivAk

How did we get here? Click play , sit back, and watch. A computer simulation of the evolution of the universe provides insight into how galaxies formed and perspectives into humanity's place in the universe . The Illustris project exhausted 20 million CPU hours in 2014 following 12 billion resolution elements spanning a cube 35 million light years on a side as it evolved over 13 billion years. The simulation tracks matter into the formation of a wide variety of galaxy types. As the virtual universe evolves, some of the matter expanding with the universe soon gravitationally condenses to form filaments, galaxies , and clusters of galaxies . The featured video takes the perspective of a virtual camera circling part of this changing universe, first showing the evolution of dark matter , then hydrogen gas coded by temperature ( 0:45 ), then heavy elements such as helium and carbon ( 1:30 ), and then back to dark matter ( 2:07 ). On the lower left the time since the Big B

Known to some in the northern hemisphere as December's Cold Moon or the Long Night Moon , the last full moon of 2023 is rising in this surreal mountain and skyscape. The Daliesque scene was captured in a single exposure with a camera and long telephoto lens near Monte Grappa, Italy. The full moon is not melting, though . Its stretched and distorted appearance near the horizon is caused as refraction along the line of sight changes and creates shifting images or mirages of the bright lunar disk . The changes in atmospheric refraction correspond to atmospheric layers with sharply different temperatures and densities. Other effects of atmospheric refraction produced by the long sight-line to this full moon rising include the thin red rim seen faintly on the distorted lower edge of the Moon and a thin green rim along the top. from NASA https://ift.tt/bEZ0uJ6