Cartwheel Of Fortune
19.12.1998

By chance, a collision of two galaxies has created a surprisingly recognizable shape on a cosmic scale - "The Cartwheel Galaxy". The Cartwheel is part of a group of galaxies about 500 million light years away in the constellation Sculptor (two smaller galaxies in the group are visible on the right).

Atlantis over Rhodes
28.05.2010

A moonlit chapel stands in the foreground of this night-scape from the historic Greek island of Rhodes. The tantalizing sky above features a colorful lunar corona, where bright moonlight is diffracted by water droplets in the thin clouds drifting in front of the lunar disk.

Gale Crater
29.07.2011

This sharp view from the Thermal Emission Imaging System camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter is centered on 154 kilometer (96 mile) wide Gale crater, near the martian equator. Within Gale, an impressive layered mountain rises about 5 kilometers (3 miles) above the crater floor.

Flying Past Neptunes Moon Triton
26.08.2014

What would it look like to fly past Triton, the largest moon of planet Neptune? Only one spacecraft has ever done this -- and now, for the first time, images of this dramatic encounter have been gathered into a movie. On 1989 August 25, the Voyager 2 spacecraft shot through the Neptune system with cameras blazing.

The Space Station Crosses a Spotless Sun
15.07.2019

That's no sunspot. It's the International Space Station (ISS) caught passing in front of the Sun. Sunspots, individually, have a dark central umbra, a lighter surrounding penumbra, and no solar panels. By contrast, the ISS is a complex and multi-spired mechanism, one of the largest and most sophisticated machines ever created by humanity.

APOD: 2025 February 12 Б Asteroid Bennu Holds the Building Blocks of Life
12.02.2025

What can a space rock tell us about life on Earth? NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made a careful approach to the near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu in October of 2020 to collect surface samples. In September 2023, the robotic spaceship returned these samples to Earth.

The Flight of Helios
31.08.2001

Solar-powered, remotely piloted, and flying at about 25 miles per hour, NASA's Helios aircraft, is pictured above at 10,000 feet in skies northwest of Kauai, Hawaii on August 13. This ultralight propeller driven aircraft, essentially a flying wing with 14 electric engines, was built by AeroVironment Inc.

Coronal Holes on the Sun
18.03.2003

The ominous, dark shapes haunting the left side of the Sun are coronal holes -- low density regions extending above the surface where the solar magnetic field opens freely into interplanetary space. Studied extensively from...

The Mineral Moon
29.08.2003

Even if the Moon really were made of green cheese it probably wouldn't look this bizarre. Still, this mosaic of 53 images was recorded by the Jupiter-bound Galileo spacecraft as it passed near our own large natural satellite in 1992.

XMM Launched
21.12.1999

X-ray astronomy entered a golden age earlier this month with the successful launch of the X-ray Multi-Mirror (XMM) satellite. XMM's three huge telescope barrels each hold 58 concentric cylindrical mirrors, together totaling a surface area rivaling a tennis court.