Astronomy Picture of the Day

2010-09-20 Ole Christian Salomonsen

Auroras can make spectacular sights. Photographed above last weekend, flowing multi-colored auroras helped illuminate a busy sky above Troms?, Norway. Besides the spectacular aurora pictured above, the photographer caught three satellites ...

2010-09-19

What dark forms lurk in the mists of the Carina Nebula? These ominous figures are actually molecular clouds, knots of molecular gas and dust so thick they have become opaque. In comparison, however, these clouds are typically much less dense ...

2010-09-18 Babak Tafreshi

Chances are the brightest star you've seen lately is actually planet Jupiter. Jupiter rules the sky in this labeled view of a starry September night from the Alborz mountains in Iran, complete with the trail of a red flashlight illuminating the ...

2010-09-17 Yuichi Takasaka

Curtains of shimmering green light sprawl across this gorgeous night skyscape. In the foreground lies the peaceful Prelude Lake, located about 30 kilometers east of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada. From high northern latitudes these ...

2010-09-16 Martin Pugh

Delicate in appearance, these filaments of shocked, glowing gas, draped in planet Earth's sky toward the constellation of Cygnus, make up the Veil Nebula. The nebula is a large supernova remnant, an expanding cloud born of the death explosion of ...

2010-09-15 Isaac Gutiérrez Pascual

Sometimes the sky above can become quite a show. Last week, for example, the Moon and Venus converged, creating quite a sight by itself for sky enthusiasts around the globe. From some locations, though, the sky was even more picturesque. In the ...

2010-09-14

What created the strange spiral structure on the left? No one is sure, although it is likely related to a star in a binary star system entering the planetary nebula phase, when its outer atmosphere is ejected. The huge spiral spans about a ...

2010-09-13 Rudi Dobesberger

An unusual triangle of light is visible this time of year just before dawn, in the northern hemisphere. Once considered a false dawn, this triangle of light is actually zodiacal light, light reflected from interplanetary dust particles. The ...

2010-09-12 Robert D. Loss

The remnants of nuclear reactors nearly two billion years old were found in the 1970s in Africa. These reactors are thought to have occurred naturally. No natural reactors exist today, as the relative density of fissile uranium has now decayed ...

2010-09-11 R Jay GaBany

A bright spiral galaxy of the northern sky, Messier 63 is about 25 million light-years distant in the loyal constellation Canes Venatici. Also cataloged as NGC 5055, the majestic island universe is nearly 100,000 light-years across, about the ...