[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, 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, 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 / 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] / 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] 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 […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION]. Credit: Thierry Cohen / Courtesy Danziger Gallery, New York In a haunting vista you can never see, bright stars and the central Milky Way rise over the dark skyline of metropolitan Pudong in Shanghai, China. Looking east across the Huangpu River, the cityscape includes Pudong’s 470 meter tall Oriental […]
As the gift-giving season comes to an end, maybe now you’ve got a shiny new telescope to call your own. Congratulations — you’re on your way to discovering many amazing things in the night sky. Be it a long, sleek tube or a compact marvel of computerized wizardry, every new telescope surely has an owner […]
