APOD: 1996-06-26
French astronomer Charles Messier was born on June 26, 1730. Inspired by childhood sightings of comets and a solar eclipse visible from his home town of Badonvillier, he became an astronomer and comet hunter who kept careful records of his ...
APOD: 1996-06-25
Stars sometimes form in colorful ways. Pictured above is a small region in the nearby LMC galaxy where stars are forming. After a star is born, it may do several things to energize its immediate neighborhood. It may develop a strong wind which ...
APOD: 1996-06-24
Color information from the Soviet Venera landers and radar data from the Magellan spacecraft were used to construct this striking perspective view of the Venusian landscape. (In this computer generated image, the vertical scale has been ...
APOD: 1996-06-23
How often do stars explode? By looking at external galaxies, astronomers can guess that these events, known as a supernovae, should occur about once every 30 years in a typical spiral galaxy like our MilkyWay. However, the obscuring gas and dust ...
APOD: 1996-06-22
This image is from the voyage of the intrepid Galileo spacecraft as it passed above the Moon's north pole on its long journey to Jupiter. It was made over 60 years after Admiral Byrd became the first to fly over the Earth's north pole. Within a ...
APOD: 1996-06-21
Pictured above is one of the world's premiere radio astronomical observatories: The Very Large Array (VLA). Each antenna dish is as big as a house (25 meters across) and mounted on railroad tracks. The VLA consists of 27 dishes - together capable ...
APOD: 1996-06-20
In November of 1969, homeward bound aboard the "Yankee Clipper" command module, the Apollo 12 astronauts took this dramatic photograph of the Sun emerging from behind the Earth. From this distant perspective, part of the solar disk peers over ...
APOD: 1996-06-19
Looking out over Lake Superior at dusk you see Venus (lower left) and ... curtains? Like an ant looking up at window curtains, aurora frequently appear as huge flowing light displays. These colorful, often spectacular phenomena are most ...
APOD: 1996-06-18
In the lower left corner, dressed in blue, is the Pleiades. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades is one of the brightest and most easily visible open clusters on the sky. The Pleiades contains over 3000 stars, is about 400 light ...
APOD: 1996-06-17
This is what the United States of America looks like at night! Can you find your favorite US city on this image? Surprisingly, city lights make this task quite possible. The above picture is actually a composite of over 200 images made by ...
