Sunspot 875 Flares
2.05.2006

An unusually active sunspot region is now crossing the Sun. The region, numbered 875, is larger than the Earth and has produced several solar flares over the past week. It should take a few more days for Sunspot 875 to finish crossing the solar disk.

A Filament Across the Sun
20.08.2012

Is that a cloud hovering over the Sun? Yes, but it is quite different than a cloud hovering over the Earth. The long light feature on the left of the above color-inverted image is actually a solar filament and is composed of mostly charged hydrogen gas held aloft by the Sun's looping magnetic field.

Orange Sun Scintillating
15.11.2011

Our Sun is becoming a busy place. Taken just last week, the Sun was captured sporting numerous interesting features including one of the larger sunspot groups yet recorded: AR 1339 visible on the image right. Only last year, the Sun was emerging from an unusually quiet Solar Minimum that lasted for years.

Milky Way Auroral Flower
18.10.2022

Could the stem of our Milky Way bloom into an auroral flower? No, not really, even though it may appear that way in todayБs featured all-sky image. On the left, the central plane of our home galaxy extends from the horizon past the middle of the sky.

Four X-class Flares
16.05.2013

Swinging around the Sun's eastern limb on Monday, a group of sunspots labeled active region AR1748 has produced the first four X-class solar flares of 2013 in less than 48 hours. In time sequence clockwise from the top left, flashes from the four were captured in extreme ultraviolet images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Simulated Transit of Mercury
8.11.2006

Mercury, the solar system's innermost planet, will spend about five hours crossing in front of the Sun today - beginning at 1912 UT (2:12pm EST), November 8. Specially equipped telescopes are highly recommended...

3D 67P
30.03.2019

Put on your red/cyan glasses and float next to the jagged and double-lobed nucleus of Churyumov-Gerasimenko, also known as Comet 67P. The stereo anaglyph was created by combining two images from the Rosetta spacecraft's narrow angle OSIRIS camera taken on July 25, 2015 from a distance of 184 kilometers.

Messier 10 and Comet
21.07.2022

Imaged on July 15 2022, comet C/2017 K2 (PanSTARRS) had a Messier moment, sharing this wide telescopic field of view with globular star cluster Messier 10. Of course M10 was cataloged by 18th century comet hunter Charles Messier as the 10th object on his list of things that were definitely not comets.

The Sun Changes
13.04.1998

Our Sun changes every day. This recent picture was taken in a very specific red color called Hydrogen-Alpha. Dark spots that might appear on the image are usually sunspots, dark magnetic depressions that are slightly cooler than the rest of the Sun's surface.

Centaurus Radio Jets Rising
13.04.2011

What if you could see the huge radio jets of Centaurus A rising? The Cen A radio jets are not only over a million light years long, they occupy an angular area over 200 times greater than the full Moon in Earth's sky.