M82 After the Crash
When did the Cigar Galaxy light up? Evidence indicates how M82, the Cigar Galaxy, became so bright and peculiar: it collided with neighboring galaxy M81. Astronomers become detectives, however, when trying to figure out when this collision ...
NGC 1818: A Young Globular Cluster
Globular clusters once ruled the Milky Way. Back in the old days, back when our Galaxy first formed, perhaps thousands of globular clusters roamed our Galaxy. Today, there are perhaps 200 left. Many globular clusters were destroyed over the ...
Apollo / Surveyor Stereo View
Put on your red/blue glasses and gaze into this dramatic stereo view from the surface of the Moon! Inspired by last Saturday's APOD, experimentor Patrick Vantuyne offers this stereo rendering of Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad visiting the ...
X-Rays From HCG 62
Scanning the skies for galaxies Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson and colleagues identified some 100 compact groups of galaxies, now appropriately called Hickson Compact Groups (HCGs). With only a few member galaxies per group, HCGs are much ...
Saturn At Night
From a spectacular vantage point over 1.4 billion kilometers from the sun, the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back toward the inner solar system to record this startling view of Saturn's nightside. The picture was taken on November 16, 1980, some ...
M27: The Dumbbell Nebula
The first hint of what will become of our Sun was discovered inadvertently in 1764. At that time, Charles Messier was compiling a list of "annoying" diffuse objects not to be confused with "interesting" comets. The 27th object on Messier's ...
Survivor: NEAR Shoemaker On Asteroid...
Not part of a television game series, the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft survived its unprecedented landing on an asteroid last month. As suggested in the illustration inset above, the car-sized probe likely rests gently on the tips of its solar ...
TT Cygni: Carbon Star
TT Cygni is a cool red giant star with a wind. This false-color picture of TT Cyg was made using a coordinated array of millimeter wavelength radio telescopes and shows radio emission from carbon monoxide (CO) molecules in the surrounding gas. ...
Apollo 12 Visits Surveyor 3
Apollo 12 was the second mission to land humans on the Moon. The landing site was picked to be near the location of Surveyor 3, a robot spacecraft that had landed on the Moon three years earlier. In the above photograph, taken by lunar module ...
LkHa101: The Hole in the Doughnut
You'd need a really big cup of coffee with this doughnut ... because the hole in the middle is about a billion kilometers across. Centered on the Sun, a circle that size would lie between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. In fact, this doughnut is ...
