Jupiter Portrait
very day is a cloudy day on Jupiter, the Solar System's reigning gas giant. And swirling cloud tops are all you see in this stunningly detailed true color image, a portion of a large digital mosaic portrait of Jupiter recorded from the Cassini ...
Aurora Oklahoma
Nestled in the central US, the state of Oklahoma is noted for its gorgeous prairie skies and wide-open spaces, but not for frequent visitations of the northern lights. Still, following the intense solar activity late last month, aurora did come ...
Mars Then and Now
Does Mars have canals? A hot debate topic of the late 1800s, several prominent astronomers including Percival Lowell not only claimed to see an extensive system of long straight canals on Mars, but used them to indicate that intelligent life ...
Eclipsed Moonlight from Connelly's...
Happily, skies over Connelly's Springs, North Carolina, USA were not mostly cloudy, as forecast, on the evening of November 8. In fact they were mostly clear early on, allowing photographer David Cortner to record the evening's scheduled ...
An Intermediate Polar Binary System
How can two stars create such a strange and intricate structure? Most stars are members of multiple-star systems. Some stars are members of close binary systems where material from one star swirls around the other in an accretion disk. Only a ...
Apollo 17 Lunarscape: A Magnificent...
Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 Lunar Module pilot and the second human to walk on the Moon, described the lunar landscape as "a magnificent desolation". Dramatic pictures from the Apollo missions to the lunar surface testify to this apt turn of phrase. ...
Eclipsed Moon in Infrared
The total lunar eclipse of September 1996 disappointed many observers in North America who were cursed with cloudy skies. However, the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) satellite had a spectacular view from Earth orbit and SPIRIT III, an on board ...
November's Lunar Eclipse
The Moon slides through the Earth's shadow this Saturday night / Sunday morning (November 8/9) giving skygazers in the Americas, Europe, Africa, and western Asia a chance to enjoy a total lunar eclipse. As lunar eclipses go, this will be a brief ...
Flare Well AR 10486
Almost out of view from our fair planet, rotating around the Sun's western edge, giant sunspot region AR 10486 lashed out with another intense solar flare followed by a large coronal mass ejection (CME) on Tuesday, November 4th at about 1950 ...
The Lynx Arc
While chasing the spectrum of a mysterious arc in a cluster of galaxies within the obscure northerly constellation Lynx, astronomers have stumbled upon the most massive and distant star-forming region ever discovered. The notably red "Lynx arc" ...
