Perseid Meteors over Mount Shasta
Where are all of these meteors coming from? In terms of direction on the sky, the pointed answer is the constellation of Perseus. That is why the meteor shower that peaks later this week is known as the Perseids -- the meteors all appear to ...
Io: Moon over Jupiter
How big is Jupiter's moon Io? The most volcanic body in the Solar System, Io (usually pronounced "EYE-oh") is 3,600 kilometers in diameter, about the size of planet Earth's single large natural satellite. Gliding past Jupiter at the turn of the ...
Las Campanas Moon and Mercury
Last Thursday the view toward sunset from the 2.5 kilometer summit of Cerro Las Campanas in the remote Chilean Andes was amazing. Bright but fading Mercury stood very close to a two day old Moon. Both a sunlit lunar crescent and earthlit lunar ...
Apollo 15 Panorama
On July 31, 1971, Apollo 15 astronauts Jim Irwin and Dave Scott deployed the first Lunar Roving Vehicle on the Moon. Using it to explore their Hadley-Apennine landing site they spent nearly three days on the Moon while Al Worden orbited above. ...
M63: Sunflower Galaxy Wide Field
The Sunflower Galaxy blooms near the center of this wide field telescopic view. The scene spans about 2 degrees or 4 full moons on the sky toward the loyal constellation Canes Venatici. More formally known as Messier 63, the majestic island ...
Behold the Universe
What if you climbed up on a rock and discovered the Universe? You can. Although others have noted much of it before, you can locate for yourself stars, planets, and even the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. All you need is a dark clear sky -- the ...
A Rocket Booster Falls Back to Earth
What's that crossing the sky? Although it looked a bit like a large meteor, it was actually the booster of a Chinese rocket returning to Earth after its launch two days earlier. On the night of July 27, the rocket component heated up and broke ...
Behind Saturn
What's behind Saturn? The first answer is the camera itself, perched on the Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting behind the planet with the most grand ring system in our Solar System. The unusual perspective places Cassini on the far side of ...
A Huge Solar Filament Erupts
Filaments sometimes explode off the Sun. Featured, a huge filament had been seen hovering over the Sun's surface for over a week before it erupted late in 2010. The image sequence was taken by the Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) ...
Ripples Through a Dark Sky
Sunlight ripples through a dark sky on this Swedish summer midnight as noctilucent or night shining clouds seem to imitate the river below. In fact, the seasonal clouds often appear at high latitudes in corresponding summer months. Also known as ...
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