Astronomy Picture of the Day

2006-10-04 Gerald Rhemann

A newly discovered comet has brightened enough to be visible this week with binoculars. The picturesque comet is already becoming a favored target for northern sky imagers. Pictured above just last week, Comet SWAN showed a bright blue-green ...

2006-10-03 Matt Russell

What powers the Heart Nebula? The large emission nebula dubbed IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart. The nebula glows brightly in red light emitted by its most prominent element: hydrogen. The red glow and the larger shape are all ...

2006-10-02

Scroll right to see the largest crater yet visited by a rover on Mars. Reaching the expansive Victoria Crater has been a goal for the robotic Opportunity rover rolling across Mars for the past 21 months. Opportunity reached Victoria last week, ...

2006-10-01

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, ...

2006-09-30

On September 12, astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper snapped photos of her colleague Joseph Tanner during the STS-115 mission. At the time, the spacesuited pair were working outside the shuttle orbiter Atlantis, some 300 kilometers above ...

2006-09-29 Stefan Seip

These two beautiful galaxies, NGC 5905 (left) and NGC 5908 lie about 140 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Draco. Separated by about 500,000 light-years, the pair are actually both spiral galaxies and nicely illustrate the ...

2006-09-28

In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded the appearance of a new star in the Nanmen asterism - a part of the sky identified with Alpha and Beta Centauri on modern star charts. The new star was visible for months and is thought to be the earliest ...

2006-09-27

What's that pale blue dot in this image taken from Saturn? Earth. The robotic Cassini spacecraft looked back toward its old home world earlier this month as it orbited Saturn. Using Saturn itself to block the bright Sun, Cassini imaged a faint ...

2006-09-26

The unusual stone mesas of the Cydonia region on Mars are quite striking in appearance. Last week, the Mars Express project released a new close-up image of a portion of the Cydonia region on Mars. This new image, taken by the robotic Mars ...

2006-09-25

Wouldn't it be fun if clouds were turtles? Wouldn't it be fun if the laundry on the bedroom chair was a friendly monster? Wouldn't it be fun if rock mesas on Mars were faces or interplanetary monuments? Clouds, though, are small water ...