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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
Pioneer 10: The First 6 Billion Miles
3.03.1997
Q: What was made by humans and is 6 billion miles away? A: Pioneer 10 - and yesterday was the 25th anniversary of its launch. More than 9 light hours distant, Pioneer 10 is presently about twice as far from the Sun as Pluto, bound for interstellar space at 28,000 miles per hour.
Hawaii
2.03.1997
Aloha! With the graceful arc of the Earth's limb in the background, the entire Hawaiian Island archipelago is visible in this stunning photo taken by the astronauts onboard the shuttle Discovery in October of 1988. Along with popular beaches and tropical resorts, these volcanic islands offer extreme elevations with dark, dry, cloudless skies.
Galaxy Dwingeloo 1 Emerges
1.03.1997
Sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees. But if you look closely at the center of the above photograph, you will see a whole spiral galaxy behind the field of stars.
Edge-On Spiral Galaxy NGC 891
28.02.1997
Is our Galaxy this thin? We believe so. The Milky Way, like NGC 891 pictured above, has the width of a typical spiral galaxy. Spirals have most of their bright stars, gas, and obscuring dust in a thin disk.
Comet Hale-Bopp is That Bright
27.02.1997
What's that fuzzy star? It's not a star, it's Comet Hale-Bopp. Not only has Comet Hale-Bopp become easy to see in the morning sky, it has become hard not to see it. It's that bright. Any morning just before sunrise, look towards the east.
Sungrazer
26.02.1997
Arcing toward a fiery fate, this Sungrazer comet was recorded by the SOHO spacecraft's Large Angle Spectrometric COronagraph (LASCO) on Dec. 23rd, 1996. LASCO uses an occulting disk, partially visible at the lower...
Star Wars in NGC 664
25.02.1997
Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, locked in their final desperate struggle against the force of gravity ... two stars exploded! Stellar explosions - Supernovae - are among the most powerful events in the Universe, estimated to release an equivalent energy of up to 1 million trillion trillion (1 followed by 30 zeros) megatons of TNT.
The Trail of the Intruder
24.02.1997
In yesterday's episode our hero, the Cartwheel galaxy, had survived a chance cosmic collision with a small intruder galaxy - triggering an expanding ring of star formation. Hot on the intruder's trail, a team of multiwavelength sleuths have compiled evidence tracking the reckless galaxy fleeing the scene.
Cartwheel of Fortune
23.02.1997
By chance, a collision of two galaxies has created a surprisingly recognizable shape on a cosmic scale - "The Cartwheel Galaxy". The Cartwheel is part of a group of galaxies about 500 million light years away in the constellation of Sculptor (two smaller galaxies in the group are visible on the right).
The Gamma Ray Sky
22.02.1997
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.
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