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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

In 1986, Voyager 2 became the only spacecraft to explore ice giant planet Uranus close up. Still, this newly released image from the NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) on the James Webb Space Telescope offers a detailed look at the distant world . The tilted outer planet rotates on its axis once in about 17 hours. Its north pole is presently pointed near our line of sight, offering direct views of its northern hemisphere and a faint but extensive system of rings. Of the giant planet's 27 known moons, 14 are annotated in the image . The brighter ones show hints of Webb's characteristic diffraction spikes . And though these worlds of the outer Solar System were unknown in Shakespearean times, all but two of the 27 Uranian moons are named for characters in the English Bard's plays. from NASA https://ift.tt/3YdVFaR

For a brief moment , this brilliant fireball meteor outshone Jupiter in planet Earth's night. The serendipitous image was captured while hunting meteors under cold Canadian skies with a camera in timelapse mode on December 14, near the peak of the Geminid meteor shower . The Geminid meteor shower, asteroid 3200 Phaethon's annual gift , always arrives in December. Dust shed along the orbit of the mysterious asteroid causes the meteor streaks, as the vaporizing grains plow through our fair planet's upper atmosphere at 22 kilometers per second. Of course Geminid shower meteors appear to radiate from a point in the constellation of the Twins. That's below and left of this frame. With bright Jupiter on the right, also in the December night skyview are the Pleiades and Hyades star clusters. from NASA https://ift.tt/qZdp4YA

Yes, but can your aurora do this? First, yes, auroras can look like rainbows even though they are completely different phenomena. Auroras are caused by Sun-created particles being channeled into Earth's atmosphere by Earth's magnetic field , and create colors by exciting atom s at different heights. Conversely, rainbows are created by sunlight backscattering off falling raindrops, and different colors are refracted by slightly different angles. Unfortunately , auroras can’t create waterfalls, but if you plan well and are lucky enough, you can photograph them together. The featured picture is composed of several images taken on the same night last month near the Skógafoss waterfall in Iceland . The planning centered on capturing the central band of our Milky Way galaxy over the picturesque cascade . By luck, a spectacular aurora soon appeared just below the curving arch of the Milky Way. Far in the background, the Pleiades star cluster and the Andromeda galaxy ...

Why is this jellyfish swimming in a sea of stars? Drifting near bright star Eta Geminorum , seen at the right, the Jellyfish Nebula extends its tentacles from the bright arcing ridge of emission left of center. In fact, the cosmic jellyfish is part of bubble-shaped supernova remnant IC 443, the expanding debris cloud from a massive star that exploded . Light from the explosion first reached planet Earth over 30,000 years ago . Like its cousin in astronomical waters, the Crab Nebula supernova remnant IC 443 is known to harbor a neutron star -- the remnant of the collapsed stellar core. The Jellyfish Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away. At that distance, the featured image would span about 140 light-years across. from NASA https://ift.tt/q6vm1LA

Single shots like this require planning. The first step is to realize that such an amazing triple-alignment actually takes place. The second step is to find the best location to photograph it. But it was the third step: being there at exactly the right time -- and when the sky was clear -- that was the hardest. Five times over six years the photographer tried and found bad weather . Finally, just ten days ago, the weather was perfect, and a photographic dream was realized. Taken in Piemonte , Italy , the cathedral in the foreground is the Basilica of Superga , the mountain in the middle is Monviso , and, well, you know which moon is in the background. Here, even though the setting Moon was captured in a crescent phase , the exposure was long enough for doubly reflected Earthlight , called the da Vinci glow , to illuminate the entire top of the Moon . from NASA https://ift.tt/rQotAbB

What's that in the center? Like a butterfly , a white dwarf star begins its life by casting off a cocoon of gas that enclosed its former self. In this analogy, however, the Sun would be a caterpillar and the ejected shell of gas would become the prettiest cocoon of all. In the featured cocoon , the planetary nebula designated NGC 2440 contains one of the hottest white dwarf stars known. The white dwarf can be seen as the bright orange dot near the image center. Our Sun will eventually become a white dwarf butterfly, but not for another 5 billion years . from NASA https://ift.tt/u3IOBFo

Colours of a serene evening sky are captured in this 8 minute exposure, made near this December's solstice from New Zealand, southern hemisphere, planet Earth . Looking south, star trails form the short concentric arcs around the rotating planet's south celestial pole positioned just off the top of the frame. At top and left of center are trails of the Southern Cross stars and a dark smudge from the Milky Way's Coalsack Nebula. Alpha and Beta Centauri make the brighter yellow and blue tinted trails, reflected below in the waters of Hoopers Inlet in the Pacific coast of the South Island's Otago Peninsula. On that short December summer night, aurora australis also gave luminous, green and reddish hues to the sky above the hills. An upper atmospheric glow distinct from the aurora excited by collisions with energetic particles, pale greenish bands of airglow caused by a cascade of chemical reactions excited by sunlight can be traced in diagonal bands near the top l...

A single 183 day exposure with a pinhole camera and photographic paper resulted in this long-duration solargraph . Recorded from solstice to solstice , June 21 to December 21, in 2022, it follows the Sun's daily arcing path through planet Earth's skies from Mertola, Portugal. On June 21, the Sun's highest point and longest arc represents the longest day and the astronomical beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere. The solstice date with the fewest hours of daylight is at the beginning of winter in the north, corresponding to the Sun's shortest and lowest arc in the 2022 solargraph. For 2023, the northern winter solstice was on December 22 at 3:27 UTC. That's December 21 for North America time zones. from NASA https://ift.tt/9h1r0np

Distant galaxies abound in this one degree wide field of view toward the southern constellation Grus (The Crane). But the three spiral galaxies at the lower right are quite striking. In fact, all three galaxies are grouped about 70 million light years away and sometimes known as the Grus Triplet . They share the pretty telescopic frame, recorded on December 13, with the comet designated C/2020 V2 ZTF . Now outbound from the inner Solar System and swinging below the ecliptic plane in a hyperbolic orbit, the comet was about 29 light-minutes from our fair planet in this image. And though comet ZTF was brighter when it was closest to the Sun last May and closest to Earth in September of 2023, it still shines in telescopes pointed toward southern night skies, remaining almost as bright as the Grus Triplet galaxies. from NASA https://ift.tt/yaMVCij

What's causing those unusual sky arcs? Ice crystals. While crossing a field of fresh snow near Füssen , Bavaria , Germany , earlier this month, the photographer noticed that he had entered an ice fog. For suspended water to freeze into an ice fog requires quite cold temperatures, and indeed the air temperature on this day was measured at well below zero. The ice fog reflected light from the Sun setting behind St. Coleman Church . The result was one of the greatest spectacles the photographer has ever seen. First, the spots in the featured picture are not background stars but suspended ice and snow. Next, two prominent ice halos are visible: the 22-degree halo and the 46-degree halo . Multiple arcs are also visible , including, from top to bottom, antisolar (subsun), circumzenithal , Parry , tangent , and parhelic (horizontal). Finally, the balloon shaped curve connecting the top arc to the Sun is the rarest of all: it is the heliac arc , created by reflection from th...

Could Queen Calafia 's mythical island exist in space? Perhaps not, but by chance the outline of this molecular space cloud echoes the outline of the state of California , USA. Our Sun has its home within the Milky Way's Orion Arm , only about 1,000 light-years from the California Nebula . Also known as NGC 1499 , the classic emission nebula is around 100 light-year s long. On the featured image , the most prominent glow of the California Nebula is the red light characteristic of hydrogen atoms recombining with long lost electrons, stripped away ( ionized ) by energetic starlight. The star most likely providing the energetic starlight that ionizes much of the nebular gas is the bright, hot, bluish Xi Persei just to the right of the nebula. A regular target for astrophotographers, the California Nebula can be spotted with a wide-field telescope under a dark sky toward the constellation of Perseus , not far from the Pleiades . from NASA https://ift.tt/bGEQ261

Are squares A and B the same color? They are! To verify this, either run your cursor over the image or click here to see them connected. The featured illusion , an example of the same color illusion , illustrates that purely human perceptions in science may be ambiguous or inaccurate, even such a seemingly direct perception as relative color. Similar illusions exist on the sky , such as the size of the Moon near the horizon , or the apparent shapes of astronomical objects . The advent of automated, reproducible measuring devices such as CCDs have made science in general and astronomy in particular less prone to, but not free of, human-biased illusions . from NASA https://ift.tt/El68QzZ

Where are all of these meteors coming from? In terms of direction on the sky, the pointed answer is the constellation of Gemini. That is why the major meteor shower in December is known as the Geminids -- because shower meteors all appear to come from a radiant toward Gemini . Three dimensionally, however, sand-sized debris expelled from the unusual asteroid 3200 Phaethon follows a well-defined orbit about our Sun, and the part of the orbit that approaches Earth is superposed in front of the constellation of Gemini . Therefore, when Earth crosses this orbit , the radiant point of falling debris appears in Gemini. Featured here is a composite of many images taken a few days ago through dark skies from Nianhu Lake in China . Over 100 bright meteor streaks from the Geminids meteor shower are visible. from NASA https://ift.tt/NR4agK2

Peering from the shadows, the Saturn-facing hemisphere of tantalizing inner moon Enceladus poses in this Cassini spacecraft image. North is up in the dramatic scene captured during November 2016 as Cassini's camera was pointed in a nearly sunward direction about 130,000 kilometers from the moon's bright crescent. In fact, the distant world reflects over 90 percent of the sunlight it receives, giving its surface about the same reflectivity as fresh snow . A mere 500 kilometers in diameter, Enceladus is a surprisingly active moon. Data and images collected during Cassini's flybys have revealed water vapor and ice grains spewing from south polar geysers and evidence of an ocean of liquid water hidden beneath the moon's icy crust. from NASA https://ift.tt/SDNH5Yq

Asteroid 319 Leona cast a shadow across planet Earth on December 12, as it passed in front of bright star Betelgeuse . But to see everyone's favorite red giant star fade this time, you had to stand near the center of the narrow shadow path starting in central Mexico and extending eastward across southern Florida, the Atlantic Ocean, southern Europe, and Eurasia. The geocentric celestial event is captured in these two panels taken at Almodovar del Rio, Spain from before (left) and during the asteroid-star occultation. In both panels Betelgeuse is seen above and left, at the shoulder of the familiar constellation Orion. Its brightness diminishes noticeably during the exceedingly rare occultation when, for several seconds, the giant star was briefly eclipsed by a roughly 60 kilometer diameter main-belt asteroid . from NASA https://ift.tt/w72IDkZ

Massive stars in our Milky Way Galaxy live spectacular lives. Collapsing from vast cosmic clouds, their nuclear furnaces ignite and create heavy elements in their cores. After only a few million years for the most massive stars, the enriched material is blasted back into interstellar space where star formation can begin anew. The expanding debris cloud known as Cassiopeia A is an example of this final phase of the stellar life cycle . Light from the supernova explosion that created this remnant would have been first seen in planet Earth's sky about 350 years ago, although it took that light 11,000 years to reach us. This sharp NIRCam image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the still hot filaments and knots in the supernova remnant. The whitish, smoke-like outer shell of the expanding blast wave is about 20 light-years across, while the bright speck near center is a neutron star, the incredibly dense, collapsed remains of the massive stellar core. Light echoes from the...