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 ...
A Space Station Meets its Destiny
The International Space Station (ISS) had a date with Destiny earlier this month. More specifically, the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis installed the science laboratory named Destiny on the ISS. Destiny, pictured here, will also serve as a ...
Sand Dunes on Mars
Sand dunes on Mars can appear exotic. The dark dunes above might be compared to shark's teeth or chocolate confections. In reality, they arise from the complex relationship between the sandy surface and high winds on Mars. These particular ...
3C294: Distant X-Ray Galaxy Cluster
Large clusters of galaxies are the most massive objects in the universe. Astronomers now realize that a hallmark of these cosmic behemoths are gas clouds with temperatures of tens of millions of degrees that pervade the clusters and radiate ...
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