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 ...
Sprint the Flying Space Camera
Yes, but can your soccer ball do this? The ball near the middle of the above photograph is actually a robotic camera designed to float about a Space Shuttle and the International Space Station and take pictures. Named "Sprint", it is NASA's ...
Mysterious Features on Ganymede
Where is the rest of the circle? Jupiter's largest moon Ganymede has some truly unusual terrain, including the pictured half circle above cut by nearly parallel curves. Full circles can be easily explained by impact craters, but partial circles ...
The Trifid Nebula in Red, White and Blue
Three dark dust lanes give the picturesque Trifid Nebula its name. The red and blue colors of the Trifid Nebula are present in different regions and are created by different processes. A big bright star near the center of the red region appears ...
A Distant Cluster of Galaxies
In this 1994 Hubble Space Telescope photograph, every bright object is a galaxy. Oddly - most of them are spiral galaxies. This rich cluster of galaxies, named CL 0939+4713, is almost half way across the visible universe. Photos like this ...
A Quasar Portrait Gallery
QUASARs (QUASi-stellAR objects) lie near the edge of the observable Universe. Discovered in 1963, astronomers were astounded that such objects could be visible across billions of light-years, as this implies they must emit prodigious amounts of ...
