Dust of the Orion Nebula
29.12.2015

What surrounds a hotbed of star formation? In the case of the Orion Nebula -- dust. The entire Orion field, located about 1600 light years away, is inundated with intricate and picturesque filaments of dust.

A Cosmic Rose: The Rosette Nebula in Monoceros
12.04.2019

The Rosette Nebula, NGC 2237, is not the only cosmic cloud of gas and dust to evoke the imagery of flowers, but it is the most famous. At the edge of a large molecular cloud in Monoceros some 5,000 light years away, the petals of this cosmic rose are actually a stellar nursery.

Jupiter s Swimming Storm
10.09.2020

A bright storm head with a long turbulent wake swims across Jupiter in these sharp telescopic images of the Solar System's ruling gas giant. Captured on August 26, 28, and September 1 (left to right) the storm approximately doubles in length during that period.

Mars Rises above the Lunar Limb
9.12.2022

On the night of December 7 Mars wandered near the Full Moon. In fact the Red Planet was occulted, passing behind the Moon, when viewed from locations across Europe and North America. About...

Odysseus on the Moon
2.03.2024

Methalox rocket engine firing, Odysseus' landing legs absorb first contact with the lunar surface in this wide-angle snapshot from a camera on board the robotic Intuitive Machines Nova-C moon lander. Following the landing on February 22, broken landing legs, visible in the image, ultimately left the lander at rest but tilted.

APOD: 2025 February 11 Б The Spider and the Fly
11.02.2025

Will the spider ever catch the fly? Not if both are large emission nebulas toward the constellation of the Charioteer (Auriga). The spider-shaped gas cloud in the image center is actually an emission nebula...

LMC X-1: A Black Hole Candidate
30.12.1995

The strongest source of X-rays in the Large Magellanic Cloud originates from an unusually energetic binary star system. This strong source, dubbed LMC X-1, is thought to be a normal and compact star orbiting each other. Gas stripped of the normal star falls onto the compact star, heats up, and emits X-rays.

In the Center of 30 Doradus
24.05.1996

In the center of 30 Doradus lies a huge cluster of the largest, hottest, most massive stars known. The center of this cluster, known as R136, is boxed in the upper right portion of the above picture.

An Ultraviolet Image of M101
27.06.1995

This giant spiral galaxy, Messier 101 (M101), was photographed by the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope onboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour during the Astro-2 mission (March 2 - 18, 1995). The image has been computer processed so that the colors represent the intensity of ultraviolet light.

Sunspots: Magnetic Depressions
13.01.1997

Our Sun has spots! These spots appear dark in photographs like the one above, but in fact sunspots are quite bright - they are just dark compared to the rest of the Sun. Sunspots are about the size of the Earth and frequently occur in groups, as shown above.