Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
Stars Without Galaxies18.01.2002
Galaxies are made up of stars, but are all stars found within galaxies? Using the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers exploring the Virgo Cluster of galaxies have found about 600 red giant stars adrift in intergalactic space. Above is an artist's vision of the sky from a hypothetical planet of such a lonely sun.
Saturn and Vesta in Taurus
17.01.2002
Last November, while skygazing toward the constellation Taurus, astrophotographer Joe Orman arranged this time exposure to include the lovely Hyades and Pleiades star clusters in the field of his telephoto lens. A distance...
Pick a Galaxy Any Galaxy
16.01.2002
Pick a galaxy, any galaxy. In the top panel you can choose from a myriad of distant galaxies revealed in a deep Hubble Space Telescope image of a narrow slice of the cosmos toward the constellation Hercules.
Abell 2597 s Cosmic Cavities
15.01.2002
Typical of large galaxy clusters billions of light-years away, Abell 2597 features hundreds of galaxies embedded in a cloud of multimillion degree gas which glows in x-rays. This Chandra Observatory x-ray image shows...
Red Auroral Corona
14.01.2002
Few auroras show this level of detail. This unusual display of an auroral corona occurred on Earth three days after an unusual solar event -- the fifth most powerful explosion yet recorded on the Sun. An X14-class solar flare on April 15 sent a tremendous Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) into the Solar System.
Sun Halo at Winter Solstice
13.01.2002
Sometimes it looks like the Sun is being viewed through a large lens. In the above case, however, there are actually millions of lenses: ice crystals. As water freezes in the upper atmosphere, small, flat, six-sided, ice crystals might be formed.
Hypatia of Alexandria
12.01.2002
Sixteen hundred years ago, Hypatia became one of the world's leading scholars in mathematics and astronomy. Hypatia's legendary knowledge, modesty, and public speaking ability flourished during the era of the Great Library of Alexandria.
The Gamma Ray Sky
11.01.2002
What if you could see gamma rays? If you could, the sky would seem to be filled with a shimmering high-energy glow from the most exotic and mysterious objects in the Universe.
Sunbather
10.01.2002
Intense and overwhelming, the direct glare of the Sun is blocked by the smooth disk centered in this image from the sun-staring SOHO spacecraft. Taken on January 8, the picture shows streamers of solar wind billowing radially outward for millions of kilometers above the Sun's surface indicated by the white circle.
X Ray Milky Way
9.01.2002
If you had x-ray vision, the center regions of our galaxy would not be hidden from view by immense cosmic dust clouds opaque to visible light. Instead, the Milky Way toward Sagittarius might look something like this stunning mosaic of images from the orbiting Chandra Observatory.
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