The Sagittarius Dwarf Tidal Stream
29.05.2005

Is our Milky Way Galaxy out to lunch? Recent wide field images and analyses now indicate that our home galaxy is actually still in the process of devouring one of its closer satellite neighbors.

Antlia: A New Galactic Neighbor
23.04.1997

Meet Antlia, a newly discovered neighbor of our Milky Way Galaxy. Announced just last week, this faint member of our Local Group of Galaxies has only about one million stars. It is late in being noticed because it is so hard to see against a bright sky.

The Century that Defined Galaxy
30.12.1999

As the twentieth century dawned a debate raged over whether the Milky Way was the entire universe. The 1920s brought observations of spiral-nebulae that housed familiar but faint variable stars, and hence placed these nebulae much farther than anything else ever found. The Milky Way, apparently, is itself a spiral nebula seen from the inside.

The Altiplano Night
7.07.2016

The Milky Way is massively bright on this cold, clear, altiplano night. At 4,500 meters its reflection in a river, a volcanic peak on the distant horizon, is captured in this stitched panorama under naturally dark skies of the northern Chilean highlands near San Pedro de Atacama.

Moon, Four Planets, and Emu
8.02.2019

A luminous Milky Way falls toward the horizon in this deep skyscape, starting at the top of the frame from the stars of the Southern Cross and the dark Coalsack Nebula. Captured...

The Deep Sky Toward Andromeda
8.09.2021

What surrounds the Andromeda galaxy? Out in space, Andromeda (M31) is closely surrounded by several small satellite galaxies, and further out it is part of the Local Group of Galaxies -- of which our Milky Way galaxy is also a member.

Galaxies from the Altiplano
13.10.2016

The central bulge of our Milky Way Galaxy rises over the northern Chilean Atacama altiplano in this postcard from planet Earth. At an altitude of 4500 meters, the strange beauty of the desolate landscape could almost belong to another world though.

Rubin s Galaxy
25.01.2020

In this Hubble Space Telescope image the bright, spiky stars lie in the foreground toward the heroic northern constellation Perseus and well within our own Milky Way galaxy. In sharp focus beyond is UGC 2885, a giant spiral galaxy about 232 million light-years distant.

The View Toward M101
4.05.2018

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy M101 is one of the last entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog, but definitely not one of the least. About 170,000 light-years across, this galaxy is enormous, almost twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy.

At the Center of the Milk Way
18.10.2002

At the center of our Milky Way Galaxy lies a black hole with over 2 million times the mass of the Sun. Once a controversial claim, this astounding conclusion is now virtually inescapable and based on observations of stars orbiting very near the galactic center.