Astronomy Picture of the Day

2010-09-04 Ken Crawford

Young suns still lie within dusty NGC 7129, some 3,000 light-years away toward the royal constellation Cepheus. While these stars are at a relatively tender age, only a few million years old, it is likely that our own Sun formed in a similar ...

2010-09-03 Bogdan Jarzyna

Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan and his crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during the first circumnavigation of planet Earth. As a result, two celestial wonders easily visible for southern hemisphere skygazers are known as ...

2010-09-02 Dave Jurasevich

Blown by the wind from a massive star, this interstellar apparition has a surprisingly familiar shape. Cataloged as NGC 7635, it is also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. Although it looks delicate, the 10 light-year diameter bubble offers ...

2010-09-01

What does Earth look like from the planet Mercury? The robotic spacecraft MESSENGER found out as it looked toward the Earth during its closest approach to the Sun about three months ago. The Earth and Moon are visible as the double spot on the ...

2010-08-31 Jaime Fernandez

The sky toward the center of our Galaxy is filled with a wide variety of celestial wonders, many of which are visible from a dark location with common binoculars. Constellations near the Galactic Center include Sagittarius, Libra, Scorpius, ...

2010-08-30

Could life once have survived on Mars? Today, neither animal nor plant life from Earth could survive for very long on Mars because at least one key ingredient -- liquid water -- is essentially absent on the red planet's rusty surface. Although ...

2010-08-29 American Scientist

The stars are not alone. In the disk of our Milky Way Galaxy about 10 percent of visible matter is in the form of gas, called the interstellar medium (ISM). The ISM is not uniform, and shows patchiness even near our Sun. It can be quite ...

2010-08-28

This ominous, dark shape sprawling across the face of the Sun is a coronal hole -- a low density region extending above the surface where the solar magnetic field opens freely into interplanetary space. Studied extensively from space since the ...

2010-08-27 Babak Tafreshi

ven though you may have just read an email claiming Mars will be incredibly bright tonight, the brightest star on the horizon is not Mars. From central Iran on August 24th, the brightest star in this twilight desert skyview is Venus, aka the ...

2010-08-26 Matthew T. Russell

While hunting for comets in the skies above 18th century France, astronomer Charles Messier diligently kept a list of the things he encountered that were definitely not comets. This is number 27 on his now famous not-a-comet list. In fact, 21st ...