Stars and Dust in Corona Australis
12.01.2020

Cosmic dust clouds and young, energetic stars inhabit this telescopic vista, less than 500 light-years away toward the northern boundary of Corona Australis, the Southern Crown. The dust clouds effectively block light from more distant background stars in the Milky Way.

Lingering Lunar Eclipse
26.07.2000

As the Moon passed almost directly through the center of Earth's shadow on July 16th, sky gazers in the Pacific hemisphere were graced by a lingering lunar eclipse. The total phase lasted 1 hour and 47 minutes, the longest since 1859. A longer total lunar eclipse won't occur until the year 3000.

RAPTOR Images GRB 021211
19.12.2002

On December 11 astronomers found one of the brightest and most distant explosions in the Universe - a gamma-ray burst - hiding in the glare of a relatively nearby star. The earliest image of the burst's visible light was caught by an earthbound RAPTOR (RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response).

Starburst Galaxy M94 from Hubble
31.07.2022

Why does this galaxy have a ring of bright blue stars? Beautiful island universe Messier 94 lies a mere 15 million light-years distant in the northern constellation of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici).

APOD: 2023 May 23 Б Jupiters Swirls from Juno
23.05.2023

Big storms are different on Jupiter. On Earth, huge hurricanes and colossal cyclones are centered on regions of low pressure, but on Jupiter, it is the high-pressure, anti-cyclone storms that are the largest. On Earth, large storms can last weeks, but on Jupiter they can last years.

APOD: 2025 April 2 Б Jupiter and Ring in Infrared from Webb
2.04.2025

Why does Jupiter have rings? Jupiter's main ring was discovered in 1979 by NASA's passing Voyager 1 spacecraft, but its origin was then a mystery. Data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft that...

All-Sky Panorama
2.02.2001

This quite stunning panorama of the entire sky is a mosaic of 51 wide-angle photographs. Made over a three year period from locations in California (USA), South Africa, and Germany, the individual pictures were digitized and stitched together to create an apparently seamless 360 by 180 degree view.

RS Puppis
17.05.2019

Pulsating RS Puppis, the brightest star in the image center, is some ten times more massive than our Sun and on average 15,000 times more luminous. In fact, RS Pup is a Cepheid...

Apollo 17 s Moonship
19.12.2019

Awkward and angular looking, Apollo 17's lunar module Challenger was designed for flight in the near vacuum of space. Digitally enhanced and reprocessed, this picture taken from Apollo 17's command module America shows Challenger's ascent stage in lunar orbit.

Moonset Over Pleasant Bay
29.03.2010

It was a sky for the imagination. In the early evening last week, the sky illuminating the unaided eye was perhaps even more illuminating to the mind's eye. The unaided eye saw clouds...