[CLICK ON IMAGE for High Resolution / Tony Hallas Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is often touted as an analog to our own Milky Way. About 50 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Pegasus, NGC 7331 was recognized early on as a spiral nebula and is actually one of the brighter galaxies not […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Credit:Martin Pugh] The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier’s famous 18th century list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, debris from the death explosion of a massive star, witnessed by astronomers […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Gemini Observatory, AURA, Travis Rector (Univ. Alaska Anchorage)] NGC 660 is featured in this cosmic snapshot, a sharp composite of broad and narrow band filter image data from the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea. Over 20 million light-years away and swimming within the boundaries of the constellation Pisces, […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / ESA/Hubble & NASA Why is there a bright line on the sky? What is pictured above is actually a disk galaxy being seen almost perfectly edge on. The image from the Hubble Space Telescope is a spectacular visual reminder of just how thin disk galaxies can be. NGC […]
CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / ESA / Rosetta / MPS for OSIRIS Team; MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA/Elisabetta Bonora & Marco Faccin (Alive Universe Images) Spacecraft Rosetta continues to approach, circle, and map Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Crossing the inner Solar System for ten years to reach the vicinity of the comet last month, the robotic spacecraft continues to […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA] Acquiring its first sunlit views of far northern Saturn in late 2012, the Cassini spacecraft’s wide-angle camera recorded this stunning, false-color image of the ringed planet’s north pole. The composite of near-infrared image data results in red hues for low clouds and […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Carlos Di Nallo] What happened to half of Saturn? Nothing other than Earth’s Moon getting in the way. As pictured above on the far right, Saturn is partly eclipsed by a dark edge of a Moon itself only partly illuminated by the Sun. This year the orbits of the […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Image Credit & Copyright: Ken Crawford These are galaxies of the Hercules Cluster, an archipelago of island universes a mere 500 million light-years away. Also known as Abell 2151, this cluster is loaded with gas and dust rich, star-forming spiral galaxies but has relatively few elliptical galaxies, which lack […]
[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 […]
