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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
The Snake Nebula in Ophiuchus
24.08.1997
What slithers there? The dark winding lanes visible in part of the constellation Ophiuchus belong to the Snake Nebula. The Snake Nebula is a series of dark absorption clouds made up of Interstellar dust. Interstellar dust grains - composed predominantly of carbon - absorb visible starlight and reradiate much of it in the infrared.
A Star Forming Region in the LMC
23.08.1997
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.
IP Pegasi: Spiral Star
22.08.1997
Spiral arms aren't just for galaxies. A hot disk of gas surrounding a compact white dwarf star in the constellation of Pegasus has recently been revealed to be imprinted with this dramatic pattern.
A Universe in a Box
21.08.1997
Is this our universe? Possibly. It is one computerized guess of how gas in the universe was distributed billions of years ago, at redshift 3, when the universe was only a quarter of its present age.
Bright Meteor, Dark Sky
20.08.1997
Has Orion the Hunter acquired a new weapon? If you turn your head sideways (counterclockwise) you might notice the familiar constellation of Orion, particularly the three consecutive bright stars that make up Orion's belt.
Super Typhoon Winnie
19.08.1997
Super Typhoon Winnie raged through parts of the Eastern Hemisphere last week. Swirling in the Pacific Ocean with winds in excess of 160 miler per hour, Winnie became one of the stronger storm systems in modern times: a Category 5 Hurricane.
Io: The Prometheus Plume
18.08.1997
Two sulfurous eruptions are visible on Jupiter's volcanic moon Io in this color composite Galileo image. On the left, over Io's limb, a new bluish plume rises about 86 miles above the surface of a volcanic caldera known as Pillan Patera.
Astro 1 In Orbit
17.08.1997
In December of 1990, the Space Shuttle Columbia carried an array of astronomical telescopes high above the Earth's obscuring atmosphere to observe the Universe at ultraviolet and x-ray wavelengths. The telescopes, known...
Pictured: An Ancient Martian
16.08.1997
Alien! Alien? Is this what an ancient Martian looked like? The tube-like form on the above highly magnified image is now believed by many to be a fossil of a simple Martian organism that lived over 3.6 billion years ago.
Impact on Europa
15.08.1997
This bull's-eye pattern marks the impact of a mountain-sized comet or asteroid on the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. Recorded by the Galileo spacecraft in April of this year, the composite false color image clearly reveals the telltale concentric fractures which cover about
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