The Solar Wind Emerges
7.02.1999

Winds of fast particles blow out from the Sun, but why? Astronomers came a step closer to answering this question recently by making detailed observations of the high-speed wind source with the space-borne Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).

Sunspot Seething
22.02.2000

Our Sun's surface is continually changing. This time-lapse movie shows in five seconds what happens in 20 minutes on the Sun's surface near a sunspot. Visible is boiling granulation outside the sunspot...

IC 1805: The Heart Nebula in HDR
25.10.2011

What powers the Heart Nebula? The large emission nebula dubbed IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart. The nebula glows brightly in red light emitted by its most prominent element: hydrogen. The red glow and the larger shape are all created by a small group of stars near the nebula's center.

The Pale Blue Dot
13.02.2020

On Valentine's Day in 1990, cruising four billion miles from the Sun, the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back one last time to make the first ever Solar System family portrait. The portrait consists...

Ghirigori Star Scribbles
11.08.2023

It's fun to scribble on the canvas of the sky. You can use a creative photographic technique to cause the light of point-like stars to dance across a digital image by tapping lightly on the telescope while making an exposure.

APOD: 2024 January 14 Б Dragon Aurora over Iceland
13.01.2024

Have you ever seen a dragon in the sky? Although real flying dragons don't exist, a huge dragon-shaped aurora developed in the sky over Iceland in 2019. The aurora was caused...

APOD: 2025 August 9 Б Interstellar Interloper 3I/ATLAS from Hubble
8.08.2025

Discovered on July 1 with the NASA-funded ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) survey telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, 3I/ATLAS is so designated as the third known interstellar object to pass through our Solar System. It follows 1I/йOumuamua in 2017 and the comet 2I/Borisov in 2019.

In the Center of the Whirlpool
25.04.1996

In the center of M51, a spiral galaxy 23 million light-years away, astronomers have identified a dense region of young stars. The graceful swirling arcs of this galaxy's spiral arms have inspired its popular name, "The Whirlpool Galaxy".

Sagittarius Star Cloud
12.01.1999

Stars come in all different colors. The color of a star indicates its surface temperature, an important property used to assign each star a spectral type. Most stars in the above Sagittarius Star Cloud are orange or red and relatively faint, as our Sun would appear.

The Longer Days
26.06.2019

This persistent six month long exposure compresses the time from solstice to solstice (December 21, 2018 to June 16, 2019) into a single point of view. Dubbed a solargraph, the unconventional picture was recorded with a tall, tube-shaped pinhole camera using a piece of photographic paper.