Apollo 16: Exploring Plum Crater
Apollo 16 spent three days on Earth's Moon in April 1972. The fifth lunar landing mission out of six, Apollo 16 was famous for deploying and using an ultraviolet telescope as the first lunar observatory, and for collecting rocks and data on the ...
NGC 6826: The Blinking Eye
The colorful planetary nebula phase of a sun-like star's life is brief. Almost in the "blink of an eye" - cosmically speaking - the star's outer layers are cast off, forming an expanding emission nebula. This nebula lasts perhaps 10 thousand ...
Gamma-Ray Burster
Gamma-ray bursts seem to be the most powerful explosions in the Universe. Yet their sources continue to elude researchers who stand in awe and frustration at the bursts' transient, enigmatic behavior. The blinking gif above illustrates the latest ...
Stonehenge: Ancient Monument to the Sun
Stonehenge consists of large carved stones assembled about 4000 years ago. Long before modern England was established, ancient inhabitants somehow moved 25 ton rocks nearly 20 miles to complete it. From similar constructs of the era, people ...
Night Lightning on Jupiter
Why is there lightning on Jupiter? Lightning is a sudden rush of electrically charged particles from one location to another. To create lightning, charges must first separate inside a cloud. On Earth, drafts of colliding ice and water droplets ...
A Farewell to Tails
As 1997 fades, so does the Great Comet of 1997: Comet Hale-Bopp. Discovered even before the Great Comet of 1996, Comet Hale-Bopp became the brightest comet since 1976. Many will remember Comet Hale-Bopp as a comet with a coma so bright it could ...
The Radio Sky: Tuned to 408MHz
Tune your radio telescope to 408MHz (408 million cycles per second) and check out the Radio Sky! You should find that frequency on your dial somewhere between US broadcast television channels 13 and 14. In the 1970s large dish antennas at three ...
The Coma Cluster of Galaxies
Almost every object in the above photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured is one of the densest clusters known - it contains thousands of galaxies. Each of these galaxies house billions of stars - just as our own Milky Way ...
Phi Persei: Double Star
It's clear who is the biggest star in this binary system. Based on recent results, this artist's vision of the double star Phi Persei, 720 light years away, shows a bright, rapidly rotating massive star surrounded by a disk of gas. A small ...
A Martian Lake Bed?
Look closely. In this Mars Global Surveyor image of the Martian surface just south of Schiaparelli crater, dark lines appear to criss-cross light colored depressions. One tantalizing possibility is simply that the feature near the center is ...
