Hyakutake: Comet Atmosphere
10.04.1998

The atmosphere of a comet comes and goes. Approaching the sun, it swells as material from the icy cometary nucleus is warmed and evaporated by increasing sunlight. Immense but tenuous and fleeting, the inner atmosphere or inner "coma" of comet Hyakutake is seen in this false color picture.

Orion Nebula: The 2MASS View
12.06.1998

Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula's glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1,500 light-years away.

Reflecting Merope
3.12.2004

In the well known Pleiades star cluster, a star's light is slowly destroying this wandering cloud of gas and dust. Above, the star Merope lies just off the upper left edge of this picture from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Mars and the Star Clusters
19.04.2006

This evening's skyscape includes a view similar to this one, recorded in western skies on April 16 - an orange-hued planet Mars wandering near rich open star cluster M35. Also notable is fainter star cluster NGC 2158, just above and left of M35.

APOD: 2007 February 20- White Ridges on Mars
19.02.2007

What created these white ridges on Mars? The images showing the white ridges, including some of the highest resolution images ever taken from Martian orbit, were recorded last year by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The Seahorse of the Large Magellanic Cloud
22.03.2009

To some it may look to some like a big space monster, but it is more big than monster. To others it may look like a grazing seahorse, but the dark object toward the image right is actually an inanimate pillar of smoky dust about 20 light years long.

AR1520: Islands in the Photosphere
14.07.2012

Awash in a sea of plasma and anchored in magnetic fields, sunspots are planet-sized, dark islands in the solar photosphere, the bright surface of the Sun. Dark because they are slightly cooler than the surrounding surface, this group of sunspots is captured in a close-up telescopic snapshot from July 11.

An Ancient Stream Bank on Mars
2.10.2012

Fresh evidence of an ancient stream has been found on Mars. The robotic rover Curiosity has run across unusual surface features that carry a strong resemblance to stream banks on Earth. Visible in the above image, for example, is a small overhanging rock ledge that was quite possibly created by water erosion beneath.

The Helix Nebula from Blanco and Hubble
12.10.2014

How did a star create the Helix nebula? The shapes of planetary nebula like the Helix are important because they likely hold clues to how stars like the Sun end their lives. Observations...

Aurora Shimmer Meteor Flash
6.12.2014

Northern Lights, or aurora borealis, haunted skies over the island of Kvaløya, near Tromsø Norway on 2009 December 13. This 30 second long exposure records their shimmering glow gently lighting the wintery coastal scene.