The Asymmetric Nebula Surrounding...
Why does the nebula around the star WR-18 shine brighter on one side? Also known as NGC 3199, this active star and its surrounding nebula lie about 12,000 light-years away toward the nautical southern constellation of Carina. The featured deep ...
Galaxies: Wild's Triplet from Hubble
How many galaxies are interacting here? This grouping of galaxies is called the Wild Triplet, not only for the discoverer, but for the number of bright galaxies that appear. It had been assumed that all three galaxies, collectively cataloged as ...
Dark Ball in Inverted Starfield
Does this strange dark ball look somehow familiar? If so, that might be because it is our Sun. In the featured image from 2012, a detailed solar view was captured originally in a very specific color of red light, then rendered in black and white, ...
Lunar Eclipse at the South Pole
Last May 16 the Moon slid through Earth's shadow, completely immersed in the planet's dark umbra for about 1 hour and 25 minutes during a total lunar eclipse. In this composited timelapse view, the partial and total phases of the eclipse were ...
InSight's Final Selfie
The Mars InSight lander returned its first image from the Red Planet's flat, equatorial Elysium Planitia after a successful touchdown on November 26, 2018. The history making mission to explore the martian Interior using Seismic investigations, ...
M33: The Triangulum Galaxy
The small, northern constellation Triangulum harbors this magnificent face-on spiral galaxy, M33. Its popular names include the Pinwheel Galaxy or just the Triangulum Galaxy. M33 is over 50,000 light-years in diameter, third largest in the Local ...
A Partial Eclipse of an Active Sun
Watch for three things in this unusual eclipse video. First, watch for a big dark circle to approach from the right to block out more and more of the Sun. This dark circle is the Moon, and the video was made primarily to capture this partial ...
NGC 6357: The Lobster Nebula
Why is the Lobster Nebula forming some of the most massive stars known? No one is yet sure. Cataloged as NGC 6357, the Lobster Nebula houses the open star cluster Pismis 24 near its center -- a home to unusually bright and massive stars. The ...
LDN 43: The Cosmic Bat Nebula
What is the most spook-tacular nebula in the galaxy? One contender is LDN 43, which bears an astonishing resemblance to a vast cosmic bat flying amongst the stars on a dark Halloween night. Located about 1400 light years away in the ...
Night on a Spooky Planet
What spooky planet is this? Planet Earth of course, on a dark and stormy night in 2013 at Hverir, a geothermally active area along the volcanic landscape in northeastern Iceland. Triggered by solar activity, geomagnetic storms produced the ...
