Noctilucent Clouds
Sometimes it's night on the ground but day in the air. As the Earth rotates to eclipse the Sun, sunset rises up from the ground. Therefore, at sunset on the ground, sunlight still shines on clouds above. Under usual circumstances, a pretty ...
The Cygnus Loop
The shockwave from a 20,000 year-old supernova in the constellation of Cygnus supernova explosion is still expanding into interstellar space. The collision of this fast moving wall of gas with a stationary cloud has heated it causing it to glow ...
Infrared Saturn
This delightfully detailed false color image of Saturn was earmarked to celebrate the 8th anniversary of the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope
Cosmic Collisions in a Galaxy Cluster
Hundreds of galaxies appear as faint smudges of light in this Hubble Space Telescope picture of galaxy cluster MS1054-03. Eight billion light-years away, the cluster is among the most distant known clusters of galaxies and is now reported to ...
Galactic Supernova Remnant IC 443
About 8000 years ago, a star in our Galaxy exploded. Ancient humans might have noticed the supernova as a temporary star, but modern humans can see the expanding shell of gas even today. In the above false-color infrared image of supernova ...
Moon Rocket
On July 20, 1969, only four days after leaving planet Earth 250,000 miles behind them, Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon - the first humans to reach another celestial body. But the Saturn V rocket which took them there actually "began" the ...
NGC 3372: The Great Nebula in Carina
In one of the brightest parts of the Milky Way lies a nebula where some of the oddest things occur. NGC 3372, known as the Great Nebula in Carina, is home to massive stars and changing nebula. Eta Carina, the most energetic star in the nebula ...
Jupiter from Voyager
This picture of the planet Jupiter was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft as it passed the planet in 1979. Jupiter, a gas giant planet with no solid surface, is the largest planet in the Solar System and is made mostly of the hydrogen and helium. ...
Rockets and Robert Goddard
Robert H. Goddard, one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry, was born in Worcester Massachusetts in 1882. As a 16 year old, Goddard read H.G. Wells' science fiction classic "War Of The Worlds" and dreamed of space flight. By 1926 he had ...
Solar Surfin'
The sun's corona is a tenuous outer atmosphere composed of streams of energetic charged particles, but it is only easily seen from Earth during a total solar eclipse. For example, this 1991 image of totality from atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii forms a ...
