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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
The Gegenschein
25.06.1999
If you look carefully enough, you can even see the glow of the Sun in the opposite direction. At night this glow is known as the gegenschein (German for "counter glow"), and can be seen as a faint glow in an extremely dark sky, as pictured above.
NGC 1365: A Nearby Barred Spiral Galaxy
24.06.1999
Many spiral galaxies have bars across their centers. Even our own Milky Way Galaxy is thought to have a bar, but perhaps not so prominent as the one in NGC 1365, shown above. The persistence and motion of the bar imply relatively massive spiral arms.
The Sudbury Neutrino Detector
23.06.1999
Two thousand meters below the ground, a giant sphere has begun to detect nearly invisible particles. These particles, neutrinos, are extremely abundant in the universe but usually go right through just about everything.
PKS285 02: A Young Planetary Nebula
22.06.1999
How do planetary nebulae acquire their exquisite geometrical shapes? To investigate this, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to image several young planetary nebulae. These nebulae are the outer envelopes of stars like our Sun that have recently been cast away to space, leaving behind a core fading to become a white dwarf.
The Galactic Center in Infrared
21.06.1999
The center of our Galaxy is a busy place. In visible light, much of the Galactic Center is obscured by opaque dust. In infrared light, however, dust glows more and obscures less, allowing nearly one million stars to be recorded in the above photograph.
A Very Large Array of Radio Telescopes
20.06.1999
Pictured above is one of the world's premiere radio astronomical observatories: The Very Large Array (VLA). Each antenna dish is as big as a house (25 meters across) and mounted on railroad tracks. The VLA consists of 27 dishes - together capable of spanning the size of a city (35 kilometers).
Venus on the Horizon
19.06.1999
Venus can appear as a brilliant evening star. Besides the sun and moon, Venus is the brightest object visible in Earth's sky. Because it is closer to the sun than Earth, Venus never...
Tharsis Volcanos
18.06.1999
Ice crystal clouds float above the immense Tharsis volcanos of Mars in this recently released picture from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. Olympus Mons at the upper left is 340 miles across and almost 15 miles high - the largest volcano in the solar system.
NGC 4565: Needle Galaxy
17.06.1999
Presenting a sleek needle-like profile the magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is viewed edge-on from planet Earth. Its core of stars bulges from the centre of a thin disk of spiral arms and dust. The core appears to be cut sharply by dust lanes to dramatic effect in this composite image.
Sprite Fireworks
16.06.1999
Sometimes lightning occurs out near space. One such lightning type is the recently documented red sprite lightning, which has only been photographed and studied on Earth over the last few years. The origins of all types of lightning remains unknown, and scientists are even trying to figure out why red sprite lightning occurs at all.
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