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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
Clouds and Stars over Cotopaxi Volcano in Ecuador
26.05.2010
What's happening above the Cotopaxi volcano in Ecuador? Quite a bit, from the looks of the above one-night, time-lapse movie, taken earlier this month. The majestic volcano is first seen through breaks in fast moving clouds as the movie begins.
Looking Back Across Mars
25.05.2010
It's been a long trip for the Martian rover Opportunity. Last week Opportunity surpassed Viking 1 as the longest running mission on Mars, now extending well over six years. Pictured above, Opportunity's tire tracks cross a nearly featureless Martian desert, emanating from a distant horizon.
Rho Ophiuchus Wide Field
24.05.2010
The clouds surrounding the star system Rho Ophiucus compose one of the closest star forming regions. Rho Ophiucus itself is a binary star system visible in the light-colored region on the image right.
Station and Shuttle Transit the Sun
23.05.2010
That's no sunspot. On the upper right of the above image of the Sun, the dark patches are actually the International Space Station (ISS) and the Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-132.
Dark Filament of the Sun
22.05.2010
Suspended by magnetic fields above a solar active region this dark filament stretches over 40 earth-diameters. The ominous structure appears to be frozen in time near the Sun's edge, but solar filaments are unstable and often erupt.
Calm, Crescent Moon, and Venus
21.05.2010
Last weekend, the Moon and Venus formed a beautiful close pair in the west after sunset, a scene enjoyed by skygazers all over the world. In this lovely view of the conjunction from Sweden, a calm lake Vallentuna lies in the foreground with sunset colors still fading behind the treeline on the far shore.
M87: Elliptical Galaxy with Jet
20.05.2010
In spiral galaxies, majestic winding arms of young stars, gas, and dust rotate in a flat disk around a bulging galactic nucleus. But elliptical galaxies seem to be simpler. Lacking gas and dust to form new stars, their randomly swarming older stars, give them an ellipsoidal (egg-like) shape. Still, elliptical galaxies can be very large.
Milky Way Over Ancient Ghost Panel
19.05.2010
Long before Stonehenge was built, well before the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, ancient artists painted life-sized figures on canyon walls in Utah, USA -- but why? Nobody is sure. The entire panel of figures...
Tentacles of the Tarantula Nebula
18.05.2010
The largest, most violent star forming region known in the whole Local Group of galaxies lies in our neighboring galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Were the Tarantula Nebula at the distance of the Orion Nebula -- a local star forming region -- it would take up fully half the sky.
Panorama of the Whale Galaxy
17.05.2010
The see the full length of this blue whale, scroll right. NGC 4631 is a big beautiful spiral galaxy seen edge-on at only about 30 million light-years away. This galaxy's slightly distorted wedge shape led to its popular moniker of the Whale galaxy.
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