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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
An Active Night over the Magellan Telescopes
21.02.2017
The night sky is always changing. Featured here are changes that occurred over a six hour period in late 2014 June behind the dual 6.5-meter Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
Almost Three Tails for Comet Encke
20.02.2017
How can a comet have three tails? Normally, a comet has two tails: an ion tail of charged particles emitted by the comet and pushed out by the wind from...
Black Sun and Inverted Starfield
19.02.2017
Does this strange dark ball look somehow familiar? If so, that might be because it is our Sun. In the featured image from 2012, a detailed solar view was captured originally in a very specific color of red light, then rendered in black and white, and then color inverted.
Penumbral Eclipse Rising
18.02.2017
As seen from Cocoa Beach Pier, Florida, planet Earth, the Moon rose at sunset on February 10 while gliding through Earth's faint outer shadow. In progress was the first eclipse of 2017, a penumbral lunar eclipse followed in this digital stack of seaside exposures.
Polar Ring Galaxy NGC 660
17.02.2017
NGC 660 is featured in this cosmic snapshot. Over 40 million light-years away and swimming within the boundaries of the constellation Pisces, NGC 660's peculiar appearance marks it as a polar ring galaxy.
The Tulip and Cygnus X 1
16.02.2017
Framing a bright emission region, this telescopic view looks out along the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy toward the nebula rich constellation Cygnus the Swan. Popularly called the Tulip Nebula, the reddish glowing cloud of interstellar gas and dust is also found in the 1959 catalog by astronomer Stewart Sharpless as Sh2-101.
The Calabash Nebula from Hubble
15.02.2017
Fast expanding gas clouds mark the end for a central star in the Calabash Nebula. The once-normal star has run out of nuclear fuel, causing the central regions to contract into a white dwarf. Some of the liberated energy causes the outer envelope of the star to expand.
The Rosette Nebula
14.02.2017
Would the Rosette Nebula by any other name look as sweet? The bland New General Catalog designation of NGC 2237 doesn't appear to diminish the appearance of this flowery emission nebula. Inside the nebula lies an open cluster of bright young stars designated NGC 2244.
Cloud Swirls around Southern Jupiter from Juno
13.02.2017
Juno just completed its fourth pass near Jupiter. Launched from Earth in 2011 and arriving at Jupiter just last July, robotic Juno concluded its latest elliptical orbit around our Solar System's largest planet 11 days ago.
Comet 45P Passes Near the Earth
12.02.2017
A large snowball has just passed the Earth. Known as Comet 45P/HondaMrkosPajduАkovА", or 45P for short, the comet came 10 times closer to Earth yesterday than the Earth ever gets to the Sun. During this passage, the comet was photographed sporting a thin ion tail and a faint but expansive green coma.
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