N63A: Pozostałość po supernowej w...

2019-12-11

What has this supernova left behind? As little as 2,000 years ago, light from a massive stellar explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) first reached planet Earth. The LMC is a close galactic neighbor of our Milky Way Galaxy and the ...

Satelita Starlink nad Brazylią

2019-12-10 Egon Filter

What are those streaks over the horizon? New Starlink satellites reflecting sunlight. SpaceX launched 60 Starlink communication satellites in May and 60 more in November. These satellites and thousands more are planned by communications companies ...

Patrząc na boki z sondy Parker Solar...

2019-12-09

verybody sees the Sun. Nobody's been there. Starting in 2018 though, NASA launched the robotic Parker Solar Probe (PSP) to investigate regions near to the Sun for the first time. The PSP's looping orbit brings it yet closer to the Sun each time ...

Meteory Geminidów nad Chile

2019-12-08 Yuri BeletskyCarnegieLas Campanas ObservatoryTWAN

Are meteors streaming out from a point in the sky? Yes, in a way. When the Earth crosses a stream of Sun-orbiting meteors, these meteors appear to come from the direction of the stream -- with the directional point called the radiant.  An example ...

Linie czasu

2019-12-07 Anton Komlev

In time stars trace lines through the night sky on a rotating planet. Taken over two hours or more, these digitally added consecutive exposures were made with a camera and wide angle lens fixed to a tripod near Orel farm, Primorsky Krai, Russia, ...

Plejady do Hyades

2019-12-06 Amir H. Abolfath

This cosmic vista stretches almost 20 degrees from top to bottom, across the dusty constellation Taurus. It begins at the Pleiades and ends at the Hyades, two star clusters recognized since antiquity in Earth's night sky. At top, the compact ...

Galaktyka spiralna NGC 6744

2019-12-05 Zhuokai Liu

Beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 6744 is nearly 175,000 light-years across, larger than our own Milky Way. It lies some 30 million light-years distant in the southern constellation Pavo and appears as only a faint, extended object in small telescopes. ...

Electric Night

2019-12-04 Ivan Pedretti

It may appear, at first, like the Galaxy is producing the lightning, but really it's the Earth. The featured nighttime landscape was taken from a southern tip of the Italian Island of Sardinia in early June. The foreground rocks and shrubs are ...

M27: Mgławica Hantle

2019-12-03 Steve Mazlin

Is this what will become of our Sun? Quite possibly. The first hint of our Sun's future was discovered inadvertently in 1764. At that time, Charles Messier was compiling a list of diffuse objects not to be confused with comets. The 27th object ...

Merkury przecina spokojne Słońce

2019-12-02

What's that black dot crossing the Sun? The planet Mercury. Mercury usually passes over or under the Sun, as seen from Earth, but last month the Solar System's innermost planet appeared to go just about straight across the middle. Although ...