The Glory
17.04.2002

Looking out the window of an airplane, you might be lucky enough to see "the glory" in the direction directly opposite the Sun. Before airplanes, the phenomenon, known to some as the heiligenschein or the Specter of the Brocken, was sometimes seen from mountaintops.

Two Worlds, One Sun
10.01.2004

Two Worlds, One Sun, is the legend emblazoned on the Spirit rover's camera calibration target. Resting on the rover's rear deck, it also doubles as a sundial, allowing students to determine the solar time at Spirit's landing site on Mars.

Cassini Closes in on Saturn
1.03.2004

Are they gone? They were not originally predicted to even be there. The mystery revolves around strange shadow-like spokes that appeared on Saturn's large B-ring, the large middle ring in the complex system of particles that orbits Saturn.

Like a Diamond in the Sky
17.11.2012

A dark Sun hung over Queensland, Australia on Wednesday morning during a much anticipated total solar eclipse. Storm clouds threatened to spoil the view along the northern coast, but minutes before totality the clouds parted.

Tranquility Base Panorama
19.07.2019

On July 20, 1969 the Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle safely touched down on the Moon. It landed near the southwestern corner of the Moon's Mare Tranquillitatis at a landing site dubbed Tranquility Base. This panoramic view of Tranquility Base was constructed from the historic photos taken from the lunar surface.

A Violet Moon
31.07.1996

Checking out the Galileo spacecraft's cameras during its December 1992 flyby of Earth's Moon, controllers took this dramatically illuminated picture through a violet filter. The view looks down on the Moon...

Earth's Plasmasphere
31.01.2001

Our Earth is surrounded by plasma. The overall shape that this ionized gas plasmasphere takes was discovered last year by NASA's robot IMAGE spacecraft, and shown in the recently released above image in ultraviolet light.

Lunar Eclipse over Rio
30.07.2018

Moonrise doesn't usually look this interesting. For one thing, the full moon is not usually this dark -- but last Friday the moon rose here as it simultaneously passed through the shadow of the Earth.

Earth at Twilight
11.06.2005

No sudden, sharp boundary marks the passage of day into night in this gorgeous view of ocean and clouds over our fair planet Earth. Instead, the shadow line or terminator is diffuse and shows the gradual transition to darkness we experience as twilight.

The Antennae
7.05.2010

Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus, two large galaxies collided. But the stars in the two galaxies cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 don't collide in the course of the ponderous, billion year or so long event.