Southern Lights and Shuttle Glow
22.02.1998

A background of distant stars, sinuous and spiky bands of Southern Lights (Aurora Australis), and the faint glow of charged plasma (ionized atomic gas) surrounding the Space Shuttle Discovery's engines give this photo from the STS-39 mission an eerie, otherworldly look.

Shuttle Over Earth
17.04.2022

What's that approaching? Astronauts on board the International Space Station in 2010 first saw it far in the distance. Soon it enlarged to become a dark silhouette. As it came even closer, the silhouette appeared to be a spaceship.

The Shuttle Launches an Inflatable Antenna
25.05.1996

High above the Earth the Space Shuttle Endeavor launches a new type of instrument - an inflatable antenna. The officially designated Inflatable Antenna Experiment was released Monday, May 20th, as part of a Spartan satellite - which contains many scientific experiments. The antenna is roughly the size of a tennis court and is even visible from Earth.

Crosby Ramsey Memorial Observatory Refractor
14.01.1999

The Massachusetts-based firm of Alvan Clark and Sons became famous for making telescope optics near the end of the last century. Near the end of this century, major astronomical observatories still boast of telescopes...

3 ATs
4.05.2024

Despite their resemblance to R2D2, these three are not the droids you're looking for. Instead, the enclosures house 1.8 meter Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs) at Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert region of Chile.

The Hooker Telescope on Mt. Wilson
1.07.1995

In the 1920s, pictures from the Hooker Telescope on Mt. Wilson fundamentally changed our understanding of the cosmos. Astronomer Edwin Hubble, using photographs he took with this telescope, demonstrated that the objects his contemporaries called "spiral nebulae" were actually huge systems of stars - spiral galaxies, similar to our own Milky Way galaxy but incredibly distant.

Ultraviolet Venus
7.05.1997

The forecast for Venus is cloudy, cloudy, cloudy. Although similar to the Earth in size and mass, Venus' slightly closer orbit to the Sun create for it a much thicker atmosphere and a much hotter surface. The thick atmosphere was photographed above in ultraviolet light in 1979 by the Pioneer Venus Orbiter.

Sunspot Loops in Ultraviolet
8.05.2002

It was a quiet day on the Sun. The above image shows, however, that even during off days the Sun's surface is a busy place. Shown in ultraviolet light, the relatively cool dark regions have temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius.

Sunspot Loops in Ultraviolet
10.10.2004

It was a quiet day on the Sun. The above image shows, however, that even during off days the Sun's surface is a busy place. Shown in ultraviolet light, the relatively cool dark regions have temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius.

Bright Spiral Galaxy M81 in Ultraviolet from Galex
15.05.2007

Where are the hot stars in M81, one of the closest major spiral galaxies? To help find out, astronomers took a deep image in ultraviolet light of the sprawling spiral with the Earth-orbiting Galex telescope.