Nabta: Older than Stonehenge
In the Sahara Desert in Egypt lie the oldest known astronomically aligned stones in the world: Nabta. Over one thousand years before the creation of Stonehenge, local herders built a stone circle and other structures on the shoreline of a lake ...
Return To Cydonia
Yesterday the Mars Global Surveyor project released a new close-up image of a portion of the Cydonia region on Mars. This cropped and processed version shows an area about 2 miles wide (the full version covers a strip nearly 2.6 miles wide by 25 ...
A Face On Mars
This image, showing what looks to be a human face (above center) and other features of the Cydonia region on the Martian surface, was produced using data from NASA's Viking 1 orbiter in 1976. Described in a NASA press release as a "rock formation ...
X-Ray Pleiades
The Pleiades star cluster is one of the jewels of the northern sky. To the unaided eye it appears as a lovely and tantalizing grouping of stars in the constellation of Taurus, while telescopic views reveal cluster stars surrounded by delicate ...
Mercury Astronauts and a Redstone
Space suited project Mercury astronauts John H. Glenn, Virgil I. Grissom, and Alan B. Shepard Jr. (left to right) are posing in front of a Redstone rocket in this vintage 1961 NASA publicity photo. Project Mercury was the first U.S. program ...
Hen-1357: New Born Nebula
This Hubble Space Telescope picture shows Hen-1357, the youngest known planetary nebula. Graceful, gentle curves and symmetry suggest its popular name - The Stingray Nebula. Observations in the 1970s detected no nebular material, but this image ...
Iridium Flare
Have you seen an Iridium flare? Satellites in low Earth orbit reflect sunlight and are often visible gliding across early evening and predawn skies. But sun glints from Iridium commercial digital communications satellites are providing the most ...
Astronaut Kicks Lunar Field Goal
Score three points for NASA. With time running out late in Apollo 15's mission to the Moon in 1971, Astronaut David Scott prepared to "split the uprights" and bring about yet another dramatic end-of-the-mission win for NASA. Scott used a ...
M20: The Trifid Nebula
Unspeakable beauty and unimaginable bedlam can be found together in the Trifid Nebula. Also known as M20, this photogenic nebula is visible with good binoculars in the constellation of Sagittarius. The energetic processes of star formation create ...
A Bulls-Eye Einstein Ring
Can one galaxy hide behind another? Not in the case of B1938+666. Here the foreground galaxy acts like a huge gravitational lens, pulling the light from the background object around it, keeping it visible. Here the alignment is so precise that ...
