The Pleiades Star Cluster
25.10.1998

It is the most famous star cluster on the sky. The Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades is one of the brightest and closest open clusters.

The Pleiades Star Cluster
18.10.1997

It is the most famous star cluster on the sky. The Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades is one of the brightest and closest open clusters.

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.

The Milky Way Near the Southern Cross
18.06.2000

This breathtaking patch of sky would be above you were you to stand at the South Pole of the Earth. Just above and to the right of this photograph's center are the four stars that mark the boundaries of the famous Southern Cross.

Lasers in Eta Carinae
28.11.1997

Have you heard about the great LASER light show in the sky? A team led by K. Davidson (U. Michigan) and S. Johansson (U. Lund) discovered that the chaotically variable star Eta Carinae emits ultraviolet light in such a narrow band that it is most probably LASER light!

Comet Hyakutake and the Milky Way
17.08.1998

Two years ago, the Great Comet of 1996, Comet Hyakutake, inched across our northern sky during its long orbit around the Sun. Visible above as the bright spot with the faint tail near...

Starry Night Castle
18.01.2008

The tantalizing Pleiades star cluster seems to lie just beyond the trees above a dark castle tower in this dramatic view of The World at Night. Recorded earlier this month, the starry sky also...

The Mileage of Light
28.05.2011

If you're driving down a dark road on a starry night, you might want to check the odometer. Earlier this month, when traveling astronomer Dennis Mammana did he was greeted with the significant mileage reading of 186,282 miles. That's the number of miles light travels in one second.

Cave with Aurora Skylight
22.07.2014

Yes, but have you ever seen aurora from a cave? To capture this fascinating juxtaposition between below and above, astrophotographer Bjargmundsson spent much of a night alone in the kilometer-long RaufarhСlshellir lava cave in Iceland during late March. There, he took separate images of three parts of the cave using a strobe for illumination.

The Pleiades Star Cluster
6.05.2001

It is the most famous star cluster on the sky. The Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades is one of the brightest and closest open clusters.