What created this unusual hole in Mars? The hole was discovered by chance in 2011 on images of the dusty slopes of Mars’ Pavonis Mons volcano taken by the HiRISE instrument aboard the robotic Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter currently circling Mars. The hole appears to be an opening to an underground cavern, partly illuminated on […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Mars Exploration Rover Mission, Texas A&M, Cornell, JPL, NASA] What would it be like to see a sunset on Mars? To help find out, the robotic rover Spirit was deployed in 2005 to park and watch the Sun dip serenely below the distant lip of Gusev crater. … Fine […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Cassini Imaging Team, ISS, JPL, ESA, NASA If this is Saturn, where are the rings? When Saturn’s “appendages” disappeared in 1612, Galileo did not understand why. Later that century, it became understood that Saturn’s unusual protrusions were rings and that when the Earth crosses the ring plane, the edge-on […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS; Digital processing: Damia Bouic] Landing in mid-2012, the Curiosity rover is searching for clues of whether life could ever have existed on the red planet [and has found] evidence for an ancient (but now dried) freshwater lake…. To continue its investigation, the car-sized rover is […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Subaru Telescope (NAOJ), Hubble Space Telescope; Robert Gendler] This gorgeous island universe, cataloged as NGC 2683, lies a mere 20 million light-years distant in the northern constellation of the Cat (Lynx). NGC 2683 is seen nearly edge-on in this cosmic vista combining data and images from the ground-based Subaru […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, U. Arizona] In this image taken Jan. 23rd, [the arrow points to ] a new supernova, now cataloged as SN 2014J, in the nearby bright galaxy M82. Located near the Big Dipper in planet Earth’s sky, M82 is also known as the Cigar Galaxy…. […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, NASA, JPL – Processed Image Copyright: Ted Stryk] Despina is a tiny moon of Neptune … discovered in 1989, in images from the Voyager 2 spacecraft taken during its encounter with the solar system’s most distant gas giant planet. But looking through the Voyager 2 data 20 years later, […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Lorand Fenyes] M7 is one of the most prominent open clusters of stars on the sky. The cluster, dominated by bright blue stars, can be seen with the naked eye in a dark sky in the tail of the constellation of the Scorpion (Scorpius). M7 contains about 100 stars […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Jeff Husted] Blown by fast winds from a hot, massive star, this cosmic bubble is huge. Cataloged as Sharpless 2-308 it lies some 5,200 light-years away toward the constellation of the Big Dog (Canis Major) and covers slightly more of the sky than a Full Moon. … The massive […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / Rogelio Bernal Andreo] Otherwise known as the Belt of Orion, these three blue supergiant stars are hotter and much more massive than the Sun. They lie about 1,500 light-years away, born of Orion’s well-studied interstellar clouds. In fact, clouds of gas and dust adrift in this region have […]
