[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope … has been snapping photos of deep space, giving us stunning views of stars and galaxies far beyond our reach. This week NASA released the telescope’s most recent composite image: the Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2014. Like the deep field images before it, this latest […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, Univ. Arizona] The gorgeous, gaseous shroud of a dying sun-like star, planetary nebula Abell 36 lies a mere 800 light-years away in the constellation of Virgo. Shrugging off its outer layers, the nebula’s central star is contracting and becoming hotter, evolving towards a final […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION , Steve Swanson, Expedition 39 Crew, NASA] In mid-April, the International Space Station captured the unmanned SpaceX Dragon capsule sent to resupply the orbiting outpost. Pictured above, the station’s Canadarm2 had just grabbed the commercial spaceship. The Dragon capsule was filled with over 5000 lbs (2260 kilos) of supplies […]
[FOR HIGH RESOLUTION CLICK ON IMAGE,CEDIC Team, Processing – Christoph Kaltseis] Globular star cluster Omega Centauri, also known as NGC 5139, is some 15,000 light-years away. The cluster is packed with about 10 million stars much older than the Sun within a volume about 150 light-years in diameter, the largest and brightest of 200 or […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / Dave Lane] Sometimes land and sky are both busy and beautiful. The landscape pictured in the foreground encompasses Bryce Canyon in Utah, USA, famous for its many interesting rock structures eroded over millions of years. The skyscape above, photogenic in its own right, encompasses the arching central disk […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Data – Voyager 2, NASA Planetary Data System] Cruising through the outer solar system, the Voyager 2 spacecraft made its closest approach to Neptune on August 25, 1989, the only spacecraft to visit the most distant gas giant. Based on the images recorded during its close encounter and in […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Dan Long (Apache Point Observatory) /Tom Murphy (UC San Diego) Explanation: This is not a scene from a sci-fi special effects movie. The green beam of light and red lunar disk are real enough, captured in the early morning hours of April 15. Of course, the reddened lunar disk […]
A cosmic mystery is uniting monks and scientists in Japan after a tree grown from a cherry stone that orbited the Earth for eight months bloomed years earlier than expected — and with very surprising flowers. The four-year-old sapling — grown from a cherry pit that spent time onboard the International Space Station (ISS) — […]
Mars, Earth, and the Sun [were to have aligned last night], a rare ‘opposition of the planets’ that only happens once every 778 days. But what makes this so remarkable is that it comes precisely a week before everyone on earth will see the first of FOUR dark red ‘blood moons’, an extraordinary event some […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Babak Tafreshi (TWAN), ESO Ultra HD Expedition As dawn broke on March 27, the center of the Milky Way Galaxy stood almost directly above the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory. In the dry, clear sky of Chile’s Atacama desert, our galaxy’s dusty central bulge is flanked by Paranal’s four […]
