Persistent Saturnian Auroras
22.06.2014

Are Saturn's auroras like Earth's? To help answer this question, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cassini spacecraft monitored Saturn's South Pole simultaneously as Cassini closed in on the gas giant in January 2004. Hubble snapped images in ultraviolet light, while Cassini recorded radio emissions and monitored the solar wind.

M1: The Incredible Expanding Crab
4.01.2018

The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first on Charles Messier's famous list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, an expanding cloud of debris from the explosion of a massive star.

Curiosity Rover Finds a Clay Cache on Mars
29.10.2019

Why is there clay on Mars? On Earth, clay can form at the bottom of a peaceful lake when specific minerals trap water. At the pictured site on Mars, the robotic rover Curiosity drilled into two rocks and found the highest concentration of clay yet.

Wolfs Cave Nebula
15.11.2022

The mysterious blue reflection nebula found in catalogs as VdB 152 or Ced 201 really is very faint. It lies at the tip of the long dark nebula Barnard 175 in a dusty complex that has also been called Wolf's Cave.

2023 CX1 Meteor Flash
17.02.2023

While scanning the skies for near earth objects Hungarian astronomer Krisztiцn Sцrneczky first imaged the meter-sized space rock now cataloged as 2023 CX1 on 12 February 2023 at 20:18:07 UTC. That was about 7 hours before it impacted planet Earth's atmosphere.

APOD: 2023 March 12 Б Saturns Hyperion: A Moon with Odd Craters
12.03.2023

What lies at the bottom of Hyperion's strange craters? To help find out, the robot Cassini spacecraft that once orbited Saturn swooped past the sponge-textured moon and took images of unprecedented detail.

APOD: 2024 June 4 Б Comet Pons Brooks Develops Opposing Tails
4.06.2024

Why does Comet Pons-Brooks now have tails pointing in opposite directions? The most spectacular tail is the blue-glowing ion tail that is visible flowing down the image. The ion tail is pushed directly out from the Sun by the solar wind. On the upper right is the glowing central coma of Comet 12P/PonsБBrooks.

LEDA 1313424: The Bullseye Galaxy
7.02.2025

The giant galaxy cataloged as LEDA 1313424 is about two and a half times the size of our own Milky Way. Its remarkable appearance in this recently released Hubble Space Telescope image strongly suggests its nickname "The Bullseye Galaxy".

APOD: 2026 January 25 Б Phobos: Doomed Moon of Mars
25.01.2026

This moon is doomed. Mars, the red planet named for the Roman god of war, has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, whose names are derived from the Greek for Fear and Panic. These...

Close To Eros
27.10.2000

Scroll right and fly close over asteroid Eros! This long mosaic was constructed of images returned yesterday by the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft as it orbited to within 6.4 kilometers of a spot in the southern hemisphere of the rotating asteroid's surface.