On the Road to Carina
This rugged road through the dark Atacama Desert seems to lead skyward toward the bright stars and glowing nebulae of the southern Milky Way. If you follow the road you will get to Cerro Armazones peak in Chile, future construction site for the ...
At the West Wall of Aristarchus Crater
Aristarchus Plateau is anchored in the vast lava flows of the Moon's Oceanus Procellarum. At the plateau's southeastern edge lies the spectacular Aristarchus Crater, an impact crater 40 kilometers wide and 3 kilometers deep. Scan along this ...
NGC 5965 and NGC 5963 in Draco
These two spiral galaxies make a photogenic pair, found within the boundaries of the northern constellation Draco. Contrasting in color and orientation, NGC 5965 is nearly edge-on to our line of sight and dominated by yellow hues, while bluish ...
Merope's Reflection Nebula
Reflection nebulas reflect light from a nearby star. Many small carbon grains in the nebula reflect the light. The blue color typical of reflection nebula is caused by blue light being more efficiently scattered by the carbon dust than red ...
The Rosette Nebula
The Rosette Nebula is not the only cosmic cloud of gas and dust to evoke the imagery of flowers -- but it is the most famous. At the edge of a large molecular cloud in Monoceros, some 5,000 light years away, the petals of this rose are actually ...
An Unusual Venusian Oval
Why would Venus appear oval? Venus has been seen countless times from the surface of the Earth, and every time the Earth's atmosphere has dispersed its light to some degree. When the air has just the right amount of dust or water droplets, small ...
Orion in Gas, Dust, and Stars
The constellation of Orion holds much more than three stars in a row. A deep exposure shows everything from dark nebula to star clusters, all embedded in an extended patch of gaseous wisps in the greater Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The ...
A February Moon's Halo
Lighting the night last Tuesday, February's Full Moon is sometimes called the Snow Moon. But the Moon was not quite full in this mosaicked skyscape recorded on February 2 south of Budapest, Hungary, and there was no snow either. Still, thin ...
At the Core of NGC 6752
This sharp Hubble Space Telescope view looks deep into NGC 6752. Some 13,000 light-years away toward the southern constellation Pavo, the globular star cluster roams the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Over 10 billion years old, NGC 6752 holds over ...
Trees, Stars, Aurora!
Have you ever seen an aurora? Auroras are occurring again with increasing frequency. With the Sun being unusually dormant over the past four years, the amount of Sun-induced auroras has been unusually low. More recently, however, our Sun has ...
