Jupiter and the Geminid
28.12.2023

For a brief moment, this brilliant fireball meteor outshone Jupiter in planet Earth's night. The serendipitous image was captured while hunting meteors under cold Canadian skies with a camera in timelapse mode on December 14, near the peak of the Geminid meteor shower.

Moon O Clock 2022
6.01.2023

The first Full Moon of 2023 is in the sky tonight opposite the Sun at 23:08 UTC. Big and beautiful, the Moon at its brightest phase should be easy to spot. Still...

Global Aurora at Mars
6.10.2017

A strong solar event last month triggered intense global aurora at Mars. Before (left) and during (right) the solar storm, these projections show the sudden increase in ultraviolet emission from martian aurora, more than 25 times brighter than auroral emission previously detected by the orbiting MAVEN spacecraft.

Apollo 17 s Moonship
14.12.2024

Awkward and angular looking, Apollo 17's lunar module Challenger was designed for flight in the near vacuum of space. Digitally enhanced and reprocessed, this picture taken from Apollo 17's command module America shows Challenger's ascent stage in lunar orbit.

Apollo 17 s Moonship
19.12.2019

Awkward and angular looking, Apollo 17's lunar module Challenger was designed for flight in the near vacuum of space. Digitally enhanced and reprocessed, this picture taken from Apollo 17's command module America shows Challenger's ascent stage in lunar orbit.

HD 10180: Richest Yet Planetary System Discovered
25.08.2010

Do other rich planetary systems exist? Our Solar System has the most planets of any known star, most probably because it is so hard to detect planets around other stars. Sensitive measurements, though, have...

GRB 090423: The Farthest Explosion Yet Measured
29.04.2009

An explosion so powerful it was seen clear across the visible universe was recorded in gamma-radiation last week by NASA's orbiting Swift Observatory. Farther than any known galaxy, quasar, or optical supernova, the gamma-ray burst recorded last week was clocked at redshift 8.2, making it the farthest explosion of any type yet detected.

The Double Haze above Titan
10.08.2004

Most moons have no haze layer at all - why does Titan have two? Images from the Cassini spacecraft that slipped into orbit around Saturn last month confirm that the Solar System's most mysterious moon is surrounded not only by a thick atmosphere but also by two distinct spheres of haze.

A Year of New Perspectives
28.12.1999

Fittingly, 1999 saw a decade of astronomical discoveries to an end with portents of things to come - embodied in new spacecraft, telescopes, and perspectives to explore the distant Universe across the electromagnetic spectrum. X-ray astronomy in particular will likely flourish in coming

G21.5-0.9: A Supernova s Cosmic Shell
21.04.2005

The picture is lovely, but this pretty cosmic shell was produced by almost unbelievable violence - created when a star with nearly 20 times the mass of the sun blasted away its outer layers in a spectacular supernova explosion.