[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 […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA, ESA; Processing: Judy Schmidt] What will survive this battle of the galaxies? Known as Seyfert’s Sextet, this intriguing group …. actually contains only four interacting galaxies. Near the center of this Hubble Space Telescope picture, the small face-on spiral galaxy lies in the distant background […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / credit: Antti Kemppainen Sometimes the sky itself is the best show in town. In January 2007, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] / Copyright: Leo Aerts This webcam and telescope image of banded gas giant Jupiter shows the transit of three shadows cast by Jupiter’s moons in progress, captured in Belgian skies on Oct. 12 at 0528 UT. Such a three shadow transit is a relatively rare event, even for a […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / NASA/JPL/SSI; Composition: Gordan Ugarkovic] This image of Saturn could not have been taken from Earth. No Earth based picture could possibly view the night side of Saturn and the corresponding shadow cast across Saturn’s rings. Since Earth is much closer to the Sun than Saturn, only the day […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] The bright core and outer reaches of giant elliptical galaxy M60 (NGC 4649) loom large at the upper left of this sharp close-up from the Hubble Space Telescope. Some 54 million light-years away and 120,000 light-years across, M60 is one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo Cluster. […]
A new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows an enormous collection of galaxies and star clusters in stunning detail. Hubble spied 10,000 or so of the estimated 160,000 globular star groupings thought to reside in the huge galaxy cluster Abell 1689, which lies about 2.25 billion light-years away from Earth. For comparison, our own […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] The Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million light years away is the most distant object easily seen by the unaided eye. Other apparent denizens of the night sky, stars, clusters, and nebulae, typically range from a few hundred to a few thousand light-years away and lie well within our own […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION]: Martin Pugh (Heaven’s Mirror Observatory) A careful look at this colorful cosmic snapshot reveals a surprising number of galaxies both near and far toward the constellation Ursa Major. The most striking is NGC 3718, the warped spiral galaxy near picture center. NGC 3718’s spiral arms look twisted and extended, […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] Caltech / Palomar Observatory / Paul Gardner, Salvatore Grasso, and Ryan Hannahoe Named the Sombrero Galaxy for its hat-like resemblance, M104 features a prominent dust lane and a bright halo of stars and globular clusters. Reasons for the Sombrero’s hat-like appearance include an unusually large and extended central bulge […]
