[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Jimmy Walker] A star cluster around 2 million years young surrounded by natal clouds of dust and glowing gas, M16 is also known as The Eagle Nebula. This beautifully detailed image of the region includes cosmic sculptures made famous in Hubble Space Telescope close-ups of the starforming complex. Described […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Malcolm Park (North York Astronomical Association)] Separated by about 14 degrees (28 Full Moons) in planet Earth’s sky, spiral galaxies M31 at left, and M33 are both large members of the Local Group, along with our own Milky Way galaxy. This narrow- and wide-angle, multi-camera composite finds details of […]
[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 […]
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[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 […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Yuri Beletsky (Las Campanas Observatory, Carnegie Institution)] A comet has brightened quickly and unexpectedly. Discovered last year, Comet C/2014 Q1 (PanSTARRS) is expected to be visible now for a few days to the unaided eye, just after sunset. The comet rounded the Sun on July 6 and apparently has […]
[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. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute] [This is] Dione, and it’s a moon of Saturn. The robotic Cassini spacecraft took the featured image during a flyby of Saturn’s cratered Moon last month. Perhaps what makes this image so interesting, though, is the background. First, the large orb looming behind Dione […]
