APOD: 2024 February 28 Б Shades of Night
27.02.2024

How does the sky turn dark at night? In stages, and with different characteristic colors rising from the horizon. The featured image shows, left to right, increasingly late twilight times after sunset in 20 different vertical bands. The picture was taken last month in Syracuse, Sicily, Italy, in the direction opposite the Sun.

Watch the Sky Rotate
9.01.2001

If you could watch the sky for an entire night, what would you see? The above time-lapse sequence from the CONtinuous CAMera (CONCAM) project shows the answer for the skies above Kitt Peak National Observatory on 2000 December 23.

Europa Rotating
15.01.2001

Evidence has been mounting that beneath the vast planes of ice that cover Europa lies water -- liquid oceans that might be home to alien life. The smallest of Jupiter's Galilean Moons (which include Io, Ganymede, and Callisto), Europa's deep interior is composed of mostly of silicate rock.

Trailing Planets
10.05.2002

Positioning his camera and tripod on planet Earth, near Maricopa, Arizona, USA, astrophotographer Joe Orman created this trailing display of the ongoing sky-full-of-planets on May 3rd. He initially captured the grouping in a 20 second long time exposure recording the positions of the bright planets and stars.

Nearby Spiral Galaxy NGC 4945
21.07.2002

For such a close galaxy, NGC 4945 is easy to miss. NGC 4945 is a spiral galaxy in the Centaurus Group of galaxies, located only six times farther away than the prominent Andromeda Galaxy. The thin disk galaxy is oriented nearly edge-on, however, and shrouded in dark dust.

Accretion Disk Binary System
25.12.1995

Our Sun is unusual in that it is alone - most stars occur in multiple or binary systems. In a binary system, the higher mass star will evolve faster and will eventually become a compact object - either a white dwarf star, a neutron star, or black hole.

The High Energy Crab Nebula
21.11.1998

This is the mess that is left when a star explodes. The Crab Nebula is so energetic that it glows in every kind of light known. Shown above are images of the Crab Nebula from visible light to the X-ray band.

Rocket Fuel
15.11.2007

This gorgeous image of Orion shows off the constellation's young stars and cosmic clouds of hydrogen gas and dust. Made with a film camera tracking the stars on November 11, the exposure lasted some 40 minutes.

A Solar Prominence Eruption from SDO
25.05.2019

One of the most spectacular solar sights is an erupting prominence. In 2011, NASA's Sun-orbiting Solar Dynamic Observatory spacecraft imaged an impressively large prominence erupting from the surface. The dramatic explosion was captured in ultraviolet light in the featured time lapse video covering 90 minutes, where a new frame was taken every 24 seconds.

IC 1805: The Heart Nebula
10.09.2019

What energizes the Heart Nebula? First, the large emission nebula dubbed IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart. The nebula glows brightly in red light emitted by its most prominent element: hydrogen. The red glow and the larger shape are all powered by a small group of stars near the nebula's center.