Peculiar Galaxies of Arp 273

2022-02-19 Jason Guenzel

The spiky stars in the foreground of this backyard telescopic frame are well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. But the two eye-catching galaxies lie far beyond the Milky Way, at a distance of over 300 million light-years. Their distorted ...

Three Clusters in Puppis

2022-02-18 Dave Doctor

Galactic or open star clusters are young. The swarms of stars are born together near the plane of the Milky Way, but their numbers steadily dwindle as cluster members are ejected by galactic tides and gravitational interactions. Caught in this ...

Chamaeleon I Molecular Cloud

2022-02-17 Robert Eder

Dark markings and bright nebulae in this telescopic southern sky view are telltale signs of young stars and active star formation. They lie a mere 650 light-years away, at the boundary of the local bubble and the Chamaeleon molecular cloud ...

Eiffel Tower Prominence on the Sun

2022-02-16 Hawk Wolinski

What's that on the Sun? Although it may look like a flowing version of the Eiffel Tower, it is a solar prominence that is actually much bigger -- about the height of Jupiter. The huge prominence emerged about ten days ago, hovered over the Sun's ...

Terminator Moon

2022-02-15

What's different about this Moon? It's the terminators. In the featured image, you can't directly see any terminator -- the line that divides the light of day from the dark of night. That's because the image is a digital composite of 29 ...

In the Heart of the Heart Nebula

2022-02-14 Adam Jensen

What excites the Heart Nebula? First, the large emission nebula dubbed IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart. Its shape perhaps fitting of the Valentine's Day, this heart glows brightly in red light emitted by its most prominent element: ...

Earth at Night

2022-02-13

This is what the Earth looks like at night. Can you find your favorite country or city? Surprisingly, city lights make this task quite possible. Human-made lights highlight particularly developed or populated areas of the Earth's surface, ...

Aurora by Moonlight

2022-02-12 Clear Skies

The ice was singing as light from a bright gibbous Moon cast shadows across this frozen lake, about 20 kilometers north of Stockholm, Sweden, planet Earth. In the alluring night skyscape captured on February 10, shimmering auroral curtains of ...

IC 342: The Hidden Galaxy in...

2022-02-11 Daniel Feller

Similar in size to large, bright spiral galaxies in our neighborhood, IC 342 is a mere 10 million light-years distant in the long-necked, northern constellation Camelopardalis. A sprawling island universe, IC 342 would otherwise be a prominent ...

T Tauri and Hind's Variable Nebula

2022-02-10 Dawn Lowry

The star with an orange tint near top center in this dusty telescopic frame is T Tauri, prototype of the class of T Tauri variable stars. Next to it (right) is a yellow cosmic cloud historically known as Hind's Variable Nebula (NGC 1555). About ...