Astronomy Picture of the Day

2003-01-07 NOAO

Open cluster M38 can be seen with binoculars toward the constellation of Auriga. M38 is considered an intermediately rich open cluster of stars, each of which is about 200 million years old. Located in the disk of our Milky Way galaxy, M38 is ...

2003-01-06 High Moon

Sometimes, during a total eclipse of the Sun, a strange shadow of darkness can be seen stretching off into the distance. Called a shadow cone, they are visible because the Earth's atmosphere is not completely transparent, scattering sunlight and ...

2003-01-05

Birds don't fly this high. Airplanes don't go this fast. The Statue of Liberty weighs less. No species other than human can even comprehend what is going on, nor could any human just a millennium ago. The launch of a rocket bound for space is ...

2003-01-04

Stars of many types and colors are visible in this Hubble Space Telescope close-up of a starfield in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Over 10,000 stars are visible -- the brightest of which are giant stars. Were our Sun at the distance of ...

2003-01-03

Not so long ago and not so far, far away, a galaxy was born. Seen in this Hubble Space Telescope image, the island universe of stars, gas, and dust cataloged as POX 186 is a mere 68 million light-years distant toward an uncrowded region in the ...

2003-01-02

Mt. Etna has been erupting for hundreds of thousands of years. In late October of last year, however, earthquakes triggered a particularly vigorous outburst from this well known volcano on the Italian island of Sicily. Local schools were closed ...

2003-01-01 StarryScapes

Ten thousand years ago, before the dawn of recorded human history, a new light must suddenly have appeared in the night sky and faded after a few weeks. Today we know this light was an exploding star and record the colorful expanding cloud as ...

2002-12-31

Could an asteroid destroy civilization on Earth? Mountain-sized space rocks could potentially impact the Earth causing global effects, and perhaps even be mistaken for a nuclear blast of terrestrial origin. Such large impacts are rare but have ...

2002-12-30 Dave Liquorice

Have you ever seen a sun pillar? When the air is cold and the Sun is rising or setting, falling ice crystals can reflect sunlight and create an unusual column of light. Ice sometimes forms flat, stop-sign shaped crystals as it falls from ...

2002-12-29

Globular clusters once ruled the Milky Way. Back in the old days, back when our Galaxy first formed, perhaps thousands of globular clusters roamed our Galaxy. Today, there are perhaps 200 left. Many globular clusters were destroyed over the ...