APOD: 2020 August 2 Б Two Worlds One Sun
2.08.2020

How different does sunset appear from Mars than from Earth? For comparison, two images of our common star were taken at sunset, one from Earth and one from Mars. These images were scaled to have same angular width and featured here side-by-side.

Halo of the Cat s Eye
20.10.2018

Not a Falcon 9 rocket launch after sunset, the Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is one of the best known planetary nebulae in the sky. Its haunting symmetries are seen in the very...

Spitzer's Orion
31.08.2019

Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like the Orion Nebula, an immense stellar nursery some 1,500 light-years away. Spanning about 40 light-years across the region, this infrared image from the Spitzer Space Telescope...

Europa and Jupiter from Voyager 1
28.06.2020

What are those spots on Jupiter? Largest and furthest, just right of center, is the Great Red Spot -- a huge storm system that has been raging on Jupiter possibly since Giovanni Cassini's likely notation of it 355 years ago. It is not yet known why this Great Spot is red.

Cosmic Rays at Voyager 1
8.09.2012

Launched on a grand tour of the outer planets in 1977, by good fortune the twin Voyager spacecraft were also headed in the general direction of the Sun's motion relative to nearby stars. Thirty five years later, Voyager 1 appears to be nearing the boundary of the Sun's heliosphere and interstellar space.

Trail of the Returner
31.12.2020

Familiar stars of a northern winter's night shine in this night skyview, taken near Zhangye, Gansu, China and the border with Inner Mongolia. During the early hours of December 17 Orion is near...

Happy Birthday Jules Verne
15.02.2003

One hundred seventy-five years ago (on February 8th), Jules Verne was born in Nantes, France. Inspired by a lifelong fascination with machines, Verne wrote visionary works about "Extraordinary Voyages" including such terrestrial travels as Around the World in 80 Days, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

Shepard Flies Freedom 7
5.05.2001

Forty years ago today (May 5, 1961), at the dawn of the space age, NASA controllers "lit the candle" and sent Alan Shepard arcing into space atop a Redstone rocket. The picture shows the pressure-suited Shepard before launch in his cramped space capsule dubbed "Freedom 7".

GRAIL Maps the Moons Gravity
19.03.2013

How did the Moon form? To help find out, NASA launched the twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) satellites in 2011 to orbit and map the Moon's surface gravity in unprecedented detail.

Four X-class Flares
16.05.2013

Swinging around the Sun's eastern limb on Monday, a group of sunspots labeled active region AR1748 has produced the first four X-class solar flares of 2013 in less than 48 hours. In time sequence clockwise from the top left, flashes from the four were captured in extreme ultraviolet images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory.