M94: Beyond the Blue
Today's galaxy, M94 (NGC 4736), lies 15 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici. In the red light image (left), its very bright nucleus and tightly wound spiral arms seem to slowly fade into a faint outer disk. But when ...
The Cartwheel Galaxy
By chance, a collision of two galaxies has created a surprisingly recognizable shape on a cosmic scale. The Cartwheel Galaxy is part of a group of galaxies about 500 million light years away in the constellation Sculptor. Two smaller galaxies ...
Globular Cluster M2
Beneath the south pole of our Milky Way Galaxy lies a ball of over 100,000 stars. M2, the second object on Charles Messier's eighteenth century list of bright diffuse sky objects, is known as a globular cluster, and orbits the center of our ...
Giant Cluster Bends, Breaks Images
What are those strange blue objects? Many are images of a single, unusual, beaded, blue, ring-like galaxy which just happens to line-up behind a giant cluster of galaxies. Cluster galaxies here appear yellow and -- together with the cluster's ...
Apollo 17's Lunar Rover
In December of 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent about 75 hours exploring the Moon's Taurus-Littrow valley while colleague Ronald Evans orbited overhead. Cernan and Schmitt were the last humans to walk or ride on ...
Three Galaxies in Draco
This intriguing trio of galaxies is sometimes called the NGC 5985/Draco Group and so (quite reasonably) is located in the northern constellation Draco. From left to right are face-on spiral NGC 5985, elliptical galaxy NGC 5982, and edge-on spiral ...
NGC 253: X-Ray Zoom
Astronomers now report that Chandra X-ray Observatory observations of galaxies known to be frantically forming stars show that these galaxies also contain luminous x-ray sources -- thought to be intermediate mass black holes and immense clouds of ...
NGC 1512: A Panchromatic View
This spectacular color picture of the core of barred spiral galaxy NGC 1512 (bottom panel) is a composite of the seven Hubble Space Telescope images arrayed along the top. Each top panel image was made with a filter and camera sensitive to a ...
Asteroid Eros Reconstructed
Orbiting the Sun between Mars and Earth, asteroid 433 Eros was visited by the robot spacecraft NEAR-Shoemaker in 2000 February. High-resolution surface measurements made by NEAR's Laser Rangefinder (NLR) have been combined into the above ...
The T Tauri Star Forming System
What did the Sun look like before there were planets? A prototype laboratory for the formation of low mass stars like our Sun is the T Tauri system, one of the brighter star systems toward the constellation of Taurus. In young systems, gravity ...
