NGC 6934 from Gemini North
What's going on near the center of globular cluster NGC 6934? The blur caused by the Earth's atmosphere has prevented astronomers from discerning individual stars in this unusual environment. Telescopes in space can help, but the new Gemini ...
Gemini North Telescope Inaugurated
A new mammoth telescope has begun to inspect the northern sky. The 8-meter Gemini North telescope, pictured above, was dedicated last week in Hawaii, with images documenting its unprecedented abilities being released. Within two years, sister ...
From Mars with Love
Are Martians trying to tell us something? An indentation has been recently photographed on Mars that resembles a heart, a common human symbol for love. Because intelligent Martians have never been known to exist, and because formations with ...
COBE Dipole: Speeding Through the...
Our Earth is not at rest. The Earth moves around the Sun. The Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way Galaxy orbits in the Local Group. The Local Group falls toward the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. But these speeds are less ...
Shells in the Egg Nebula
The Egg Nebula is taking a beating. Like a baby chick pecking its way out of an egg, the star in the center of the Egg Nebula is casting away shells of gas and dust as it slowly transforms itself into a white dwarf star. The above picture was ...
The Gegenschein
If you look carefully enough, you can even see the glow of the Sun in the opposite direction. At night this glow is known as the gegenschein (German for "counter glow"), and can be seen as a faint glow in an extremely dark sky, as pictured ...
NGC 1365: A Nearby Barred Spiral Galaxy
Many spiral galaxies have bars across their centers. Even our own Milky Way Galaxy is thought to have a bar, but perhaps not so prominent as the one in NGC 1365, shown above. The persistence and motion of the bar imply relatively massive ...
PKS285-02: A Young Planetary Nebula
How do planetary nebulae acquire their exquisite geometrical shapes? To investigate this, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to image several young planetary nebulae. These nebulae are the outer envelopes of stars like our Sun that ...
The Galactic Center in Infrared
The center of our Galaxy is a busy place. In visible light, much of the Galactic Center is obscured by opaque dust. In infrared light, however, dust glows more and obscures less, allowing nearly one million stars to be recorded in the above ...
A Very Large Array of Radio Telescopes
Pictured above is one of the world's premiere radio astronomical observatories: The Very Large Array (VLA). Each antenna dish is as big as a house (25 meters across) and mounted on railroad tracks. The VLA consists of 27 dishes - together ...
