Perseid Night at Yosemite

2016-08-18 Mike Shaw

The 2016 Perseid meteor shower performed well on the night of August 11/12. The sky on that memorable evening was recorded from a perch overlooking Yosemite Valley, planet Earth, in this scene composed of 25 separate images selected from an ...

Meteor before Galaxy

2016-08-17 Fritz Helmut Hemmerich

What's that green streak in front of the Andromeda galaxy? A meteor. While photographing the Andromeda galaxy last Friday, near the peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower, a sand-sized rock from deep space crossed right in front of our Milky Way ...

Five Planets and the Moon over Australia

2016-08-16 Terrastro

It is not a coincidence that planets line up. That's because all of the planets orbit the Sun in (nearly) a single sheet called the plane of the ecliptic. When viewed from inside that plane -- as Earth dwellers are likely to do -- the planets all ...

Human as Spaceship

2016-08-15

You are a spaceship soaring through the universe. So is your dog. We all carry with us trillions of microorganisms as we go through life. These multitudes of bacteria, fungi, and archaea have different DNA than you. Collectively called your ...

The Keyhole in the Carina Nebula

2016-08-14

The dark dusty Keyhole Nebula gets its name from its unusual shape. The looping Keyhole, in this featured classic image by the Hubble Space Telescope, is a smaller region inside the larger Carina Nebula. Dramatic dark dust knots and complex ...

Perseid from Torralba del Burgo

2016-08-13 Fernando Cabrerizo

Perseid meteors rained on planet Earth last night. This year the stream of dust from periodic comet Swift-Tuttle has produced a stunningly active shower of bright cosmic streaks. In this 25 second long exposure, one luminous Perseid trail, fast ...

The Easterbunny Comes to NGC 4725

2016-08-12 Bob English

At first called "Easterbunny" by its discovery team, officially named Makemake is the second brightest dwarf planet of the Kuiper belt. The icy world appears twice in this astronomical image, based on data taken on June 29 and 30 of the bright ...

Perseid, Aurora, and Noctilucent Clouds

2016-08-11 Göran Strand

Night skies over northern Sweden can hold some tantalizing sights in August. Gazing toward the Big Dipper, this beautiful skyscape captures three of them in a single frame taken last August 12/13. Though receding from northern skies for the ...

Colliding Galaxies in Stephan's Quintet

2016-08-10

Will either of these galaxies survive? In what might be dubbed as a semi-final round in a galactic elimination tournament, the two spirals of NGC 7318 are colliding. The featured picture was created from images taken by the Hubble Space ...

Mars at Closest Approach

2016-08-09

When does Mars appear the largest? This occurs when Earth sweeps past Mars in their respective orbits around the Sun, creating a momentary Sun-Earth-Mars alignment called opposition. The featured image shows the Mars opposition that occurred ...