This is what Europe looks like at night! Can you find your favorite European city? Although not all of Europe is shown, city lights might make this task possible. The above picture is actually a composite of over 200 images made by satellites ...
Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, locked in their final desperate struggle against the force of gravity ... two stars exploded! stellar explosions - Supernovae - are among the most powerful events in the Universe, estimated to release an ...
Launched last month, NASA's Landsat 7 spacecraft now orbits planet Earth. Looking down from an altitude of 700 km, Landsat 7 can map the planet's surface in visible and infrared bands and resolve features 30 meters across or smaller. For example, ...
Dwarfed by Olympus Mons and the other immense shield volcanos on Mars, Apollinaris Patera rises only 3 miles or so into the thin martian atmosphere, but bright water-ice clouds can be still be seen hovering around its summit. Mars' volcanic ...
How did spiral galaxy ESO510-13 get bent out-of-shape? The disks of many spirals are thin and flat, but not solid. Spiral disks are loose conglomerations of billions of stars and diffuse gas all gravitationally orbiting a galaxy center. A flat ...
Where did all the stars go? What used to be considered a hole in the sky is now known to astronomers as a dark molecular cloud. Here, a high concentration of dust and molecular gas absorb practically all the visible light emitted from ...
Our universe is a very dusty place. Dust usually shows its presence by blocking out light emitted from stars or nebulae behind it, sometimes creating the illusion of a horse's head or a sombrero hat. But nobody really knows what a typical ...
On September 18, 1997, many stargazers in the U. S. were able to watch a lovely early morning lunar occultation as a bright Moon passed in front of Saturn. Using a 1.2 meter reflector, astronomer Kris Stanek had an excellent view of this ...
Hot blue stars, red glowing hydrogen gas, and dark, obscuring dust clouds are strewn through this dramatic region of the Milky Way in the southern constellation of Ara (the Altar). About 4,000 light-years from Earth, the stars at the left are ...
Today, the space capsule Liberty Bell 7 rests about 3 miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. But on July 21, 1961, astronaut Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom rode this tiny craft 118 miles above the Earth to become the second American in space. ...