Edge on NGC 3628
20.06.2013

Sharp telescopic views of magnificent edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 3628 show a puffy galactic disk divided by dark dust lanes. Of course, this deep galactic portrait puts some astronomers in mind of its popular moniker, The Hamburger Galaxy.

M31: The Andromeda Galaxy
24.07.1995

Andromeda is the nearest major galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy. Our Galaxy is thought to look much like Andromeda. Together these two galaxies dominate the Local Group of galaxies. The diffuse light from Andromeda is caused by the hundreds of billions of stars that compose it.

M57: The Ring Nebula
27.07.1995

A star with mass similar to that of our Sun will throw off its outer gasses after fusion has stopped in its core. Possibly the most visually spectacular of these planetary nebula is the pictured Ring Nebula. The appearance as a ring is really an illusion of projection - the nebula is actually a spherical shell.

Sagittarius Dwarf Irregular Galaxy
16.11.2004

How old is this galaxy? The nearby Local Group galaxy dubbed the Sagittarius Dwarf Irregular Galaxy (SagDIG) is not only very small but also has relatively few elements more massive than helium.

David N. Schramm, 1945 - 1997
22.12.1997

David N. Schramm effectively combined the very big with the very small. Among his many scientific achievements, Schramm and collaborators successfully used Big Bang cosmology to predict that only three families of elementary particles exist in the universe, which was subsequently confirmed by high energy particle accelerators.

Quasar in an Elliptical Galaxy
9.04.1998

Where do quasars live? Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe, so bright they can be seen from across the universe. Observations continue to show that most quasars are surrounded by a relatively faint nebulous patch. Astronomers are trying to identify the nature of these patches.

Time Tunnel
6.09.2007

Spiky stars are nearby, but fuzzy galaxies are strewn far across the Universe in this cosmic view. Spanning about 1/2 degree on the sky, the pretty picture is the result of astronomer Johannes Schedler's project to look back in time, toward a quasar 12.7 billion light-years away.

The Hubble Extreme Deep Field
14.10.2012

What did the first galaxies look like? To help answer this question, the Hubble Space Telescope has just finished taking the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), the deepest image of the universe ever taken in visible light.

The Far Infrared Sky
17.05.2000

Three major sources contribute to the far-infrared sky: our Solar System, our Galaxy, and our Universe. The above recently released image, in representative colors, is the highest resolution projection yet created of the entire far-infrared sky (60 - 240 microns) created from years of observations by the now-defunct robot spacecraft COBE.

APOD: 2024 September 11 Б A Night Sky over the Tatra Mountains
11.09.2024

A natural border between Slovakia and Poland is the Tatra Mountains. A prominent destination for astrophotographers, the Tatras are the highest mountain range in the Carpathians. In the featured image taken...