In the Center of 30 Doradus
In the center of 30 Doradus lies a huge cluster of the largest, hottest, most massive stars known. The center of this cluster, known as R136, is boxed in the upper right portion of the above picture. The gas and dust filling the rest of the ...
Comet Halley and the Milky Way
Comet Halley was photographed superposed in front of the disk of our Milky Way Galaxy in 1986 by the Kuiper Airborne Observatory. Comet Halley is the bright white streak near this photograph's center. Comet Halley is the most famous comet in ...
Colliding Supernova Remnants
When a massive star exhausts its nuclear fuel it explodes. This stellar detonation, a supernova, propels vast amounts of starstuff outwards, initially at millions of miles per hour. For another 100,000 years or so the expanding supernova remnant ...
Half Dome Rock on Mars
Who ordered the Martian pizza? As Mars Pathfinder and its mobile robot Sojourner continue to explore Mars, new and interesting rocks are being discovered, even though the primary mission has been successfully completed. The rock pictured above ...
A Wolf Rayet Star Bubble
What's a Wolf-Rayet star, and how did it create that spherical bubble and sweeping arc? A Wolf-Rayet star is a star that originated with a mass over 40 times that of our Sun. An extremely hot, luminous star, it has since expelled shells of ...
The Ecliptic Plane
The Plane of the Ecliptic is illustrated in this Clementine star tracker camera image which reveals (from right to left) the Moon lit by Earthshine, the Sun's corona rising over the Moon's dark limb, and the planets Saturn, Mars, and Mercury. The ...
A Lonely Neutron Star
How massive can a star get without imploding into a black hole? These limits are being tested by the discovery of a lone neutron star in space. Observations by the Hubble Space Telescope released Wednesday, have been combined with previous ...
T Pyxidis: Recurrent Nova
What happens when a thermonuclear blast occurs on the surface of a white dwarf star? Over the years astronomers have watched (at a safe distance ...) as, 6,000 light years from Earth in the southern constellation Pyxis, a binary star known as T ...
Moon Occults Saturn
Many stargazers in the U. S. were able to watch a lovely lunar occultation early last Thursday morning as a bright Moon passed in front of Saturn. Using a 1.2 meter reflector, astronomer Kris Stanek had an excellent view of this dream-like event ...
A Martian Autumn Begins
Today is the first day of Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere of Planet Earth. The Autumnal Equinox occured yesterday at 7:56 pm EDT as the Sun crossed the celestial equator from North to South. Mars has seasons too and for the same reason that ...
