All of These Space Images are Fake...
Why would you want to fake a universe? For one reason -- to better understand our real universe. Many astronomical projects seeking to learn properties of our universe now start with a robotic telescope taking sequential images of the night sky. ...
A Filament Leaps from the Sun
Why, sometimes, does part of the Sun's atmosphere leap into space? The reason lies in changing magnetic fields that thread through the Sun's surface. Regions of strong surface magnetism, known as active regions, are usually marked by dark ...
The Cat's Eye Nebula in Optical and...
To some it looks like a cat's eye. To others, perhaps like a giant cosmic conch shell. It is actually one of brightest and most highly detailed planetary nebula known, composed of gas expelled in the brief yet glorious phase near the end of life ...
The Galaxy Between Two Friends
On an August night two friends enjoyed this view after a day's hike on the Plateau d'Emparis in the French Alps. At 2400 meters altitude the sky was clear. Light from a setting moon illuminates the foreground captured in the simple vertical ...
The Dark Seahorse in Cepheus
Light-years across, this suggestive shape known as the Seahorse Nebula appears in silhouette against a rich, luminous background of stars. Seen toward the royal northern constellation of Cepheus, the dusty, obscuring clouds are part of a Milky ...
NGC 147 and NGC 185
Dwarf galaxies NGC 147 (left) and NGC 185 stand side by side in this sharp telescopic portrait. The two are not-often-imaged satellites of M31, the great spiral Andromeda Galaxy, some 2.5 million light-years away. Their separation on the sky, ...
The Horsehead and Flame Nebulas
The Horsehead Nebula is one of the most famous nebulae on the sky. It is visible as the dark indentation to the orange emission nebula at the far right of the featured picture. The horse-head feature is dark because it is really an opaque dust ...
SN Requiem: A Supernova Seen Three...
We've seen this same supernova three times -- when will we see it a fourth? When a distant star explodes in a supernova, we're lucky if we see it even once. In the case of AT 2016jka ("SN Requiem"), because the exploding star happened to be ...
A Waterfall and the Milky Way
The dream was to capture both the waterfall and the Milky Way together. Difficulties included finding a good camera location, artificially illuminating the waterfall and the surrounding valley effectively, capturing the entire scene with numerous ...
Dark Matter in a Simulated Universe
Is our universe haunted? It might look that way on this dark matter map. The gravity of unseen dark matter is the leading explanation for why galaxies rotate so fast, why galaxies orbit clusters so fast, why gravitational lenses so strongly ...
