APOD: 2025 June 17 Б Rosette Nebula Deep Field
16.06.2025

Can you find the Rosette Nebula? The red flowery-looking nebula just above the image center may seem a good choice, but that's not it. The famous Rosette Nebula is really located on the lower right, here colored blue and white, and connected to the other nebulas by gold-colored filaments.

Solar Sail
26.05.2000

Nearly 400 years ago astronomer Johannes Kepler observed comet tails blown by a solar breeze and suggested that vessels might likewise navigate through space using appropriately fashioned sails. It is now widely recognized that...

The Deep Field
8.02.1997

Galaxies like colorful pieces of candy fill the Hubble Deep Field - humanity's most distant yet optical view of the Universe. The dimmest, some as faint as 30th magnitude (about four billion times fainter...

Reflecting Merope
3.12.2004

In the well known Pleiades star cluster, a star's light is slowly destroying this wandering cloud of gas and dust. Above, the star Merope lies just off the upper left edge of this picture from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Comet, Meteor, Nebula, Star
21.12.2004

Several wonders of the late-year northern sky appeared together for a few fleeting moments on December 13. On the bottom left, just above the hill, is blue Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.

Candidates for a Hypernova
20.04.1999

What created these huge explosion remnants? Speculation has been building recently that outbursts even more powerful than well-known supernovae might occur. Dubbed hypernovae, these explosions might result from high-mass stars and liberate perhaps ten times more energy than conventional supernovae.

J1502 1115: A Triple Black Hole Galaxy
7.07.2014

Most galaxies contain one supermassive black hole -- why does this galaxy have three? The likely reason is that galaxy J1502+1115 is the product of the recent coalescence of three smaller galaxies.

M27: The Dumbbell Nebula
14.09.2014

The first hint of what will become of our Sun was discovered inadvertently in 1764. At that time, Charles Messier was compiling a list of diffuse objects not to be confused with comets.

Charon and the Small Moons of Pluto
25.10.2015

What do the moons of Pluto look like? Before a decade ago, only the largest moon Charon was known, but never imaged. As the robotic New Horizons spacecraft was prepared and launched, other moons were identified on Hubble images but remained only specks of light.

A Falcon 9 Moon
4.09.2020

Illuminating planet Earth's night, full moons can have many names. This year the last full moon of northern hemisphere summer was on September 2, known to some as the Full Corn Moon.