Sun, Moon, Hot Air Balloon
6.06.2003

Anticipating the celestial shadow play of a solar eclipse, sky gazers across Germany watched the Sun rise on May 31. In Bonn, astrophotographer Thilo Kranz had set up his small refractor telescope and camera on the Kennedy Bridge across the Rhein river to get a good view to the northeast.

Total Solar Eclipse Shadow from a Balloon
27.08.2018

Where were you during the Great American Eclipse of 2017? A year ago last week, over 100 million of people in North America went outside to see a partial eclipse of the Sun, while...

Balloon TIGER
1.02.2002

Where does a two-ton tiger hang out? Well, in this case the Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder (TIGER) experiment hangs from a mobile crane on the far left in this panorama photo recorded last December near McMurdo Station, Antarctica.

The Race to Reveal Our Universe
9.05.2000

A race is underway to understand our universe through background radiation produced during its infancy. Observationally, increasingly accurate balloon experiments are pressing to beat future space-faring satellites to definitive measurements of universe-determining spot characteristics of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation.

The Tarantula Nebula from SuperBIT
27.04.2023

The Tarantula Nebula, also known as 30 Doradus, is more than a thousand light-years in diameter, a giant star forming region within nearby satellite galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud. About 160 thousand light-years away, it's the largest, most violent star forming region known in the whole Local Group of galaxies.

Falling to Earth
10.02.2014

What would it be like to fall to Earth from really high up? A new record for the highest jump was accomplished in 2012 by Felix Baumgartner. Surpassing the previous record of 31.3 kilometer...

To Scale: The Solar System
25.12.2015

Want to build a scale model Solar System? A blue marble 1.4 centimeters (about half an inch) across would be a good choice for a scale model Earth. Since the Sun is 109 times the diameter of Earth, a 1.5 meter diameter balloon could represent the Sun.

The Hubble 5 Planetary Nebula
19.01.1998

The Hubble Double Bubble Planetary Nebula is bubbling over with excitement. More mundanely known as Hubble 5, this bipolar planetary nebula is being created by a hot wind of particles streaming away from the central star system.

Philae Attempts Comet Nucleus Landing
11.11.2014

Today humanity will make its first attempt to land a probe on the nucleus of a comet. As the day progresses, the Philae (fee-LAY) lander will separate from the Rosetta spacecraft and head down...

BOOMERANG Images The Early Universe
3.05.2000

Drifting through the stratosphere above Antarctica in late 1998, the balloon-borne BOOMERANG telescope peered into the cosmos at millimeter wavelengths. The blotchy structures it detected are seen above in the sharpest yet picture of the universe at an early age, perhaps a mere 300,000 years old.