[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Apollo 8, NASA What’s that rising over the edge of the Moon? Earth. About 47 years ago, in December of 1968, the Apollo 8 crew flew from the Earth to the Moon and back again. Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders were launched atop a Saturn V rocket […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, M31 / Robert Gendler] What is the nearest major galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy? Andromeda. In fact, our Galaxy is thought to look much like Andromeda. Together these two galaxies dominate the Local Group of galaxies. The diffuse light from Andromeda is caused by the hundreds of […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, NASA, ESA, H. Lee & H. Ford (Johns Hopkins U.)] Many of the brightest blue images are of a single, unusual, beaded, blue, ring-like galaxy which just happens to line-up behind a giant cluster of galaxies. Cluster galaxies here typically appear yellow and — together with the cluster’s dark […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Jared Tennant Dusty debris from periodic Comet Swift-Tuttle was swept up by planet Earth this week. Vaporized by their passage through the dense atmosphere at 59 kilometers per second, the tiny grains produced a stream of Perseid meteors. A bright, colorful Perseid meteor flash was captured during this 20 […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIS RESOLUTION, Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI /NASA)] Why does the Sombrero Galaxy look like a hat? Reasons include the Sombrero’s unusually large and extended central bulge of stars, and dark prominent dust lanes that appear in a disk that we see nearly edge-on. Billions of old stars cause the diffuse glow […]
In its final farewell to Pluto, New Horizons … [sent] an image of exotic ice across the dwarf planet’s surface, revealing signs of recent geologic activity — something scientists hoped to find but didn’t expect. ‘We’ve only seen surfaces like this on active worlds like Earth and Mars,’ said mission co-investigator John Spencer of SwRI. […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ. / APL, Southwest Research Inst. A 50 mile (80 kilometer) trip across Pluto would cover the distance indicated by the scale bar/ The close-up of the icy world’s rugged equatorial terrain was captured when the New Horizons spacecraft was about 47,800 miles (77,000 kilometers) […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION], Ben Cooper Destination: Pluto. The New Horizons spacecraft [atop a powerful Atlas V rocket] roared off its launch pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA in 2006 toward adventures in the distant Solar System. The craft is the fastest spaceships ever launched by humans, having passed the Moon only […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] There’s a near-perfect heart shape on Pluto’s rusty red surface which scientists are seeing for the first time as a piano-sized NASA spacecraft, New Horizons, hurtles toward the distant body on its way toward a historic flyby on July 14. … Pluto [was] once considered the farthest planet in […]
Kelly Beatty, Sky and Telescope The two brightest planets are gliding closer together in the early evening sky, and their celestial dance culminates with an ultra-close pairing on June 30th. Anyone who pays even cursory attention to the evening sky has surely noticed that the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter, have been drawing closer […]
