[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Left Image: Damia Bouic; Right Image: NASA, JPL-Caltech] How different does sunset appear from Mars than from Earth? For comparison, two images of our common star were taken at sunset, one from Earth and one from Mars. These images were scaled to have same angular width and featured here […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Image Credit & Copyright: Dani Caxete] What’s that in front of the Moon? It’s the International Space Station. Using precise timing, the Earth-orbiting space platform was photographed in front of a partially lit Moon last year. The featured image was taken from Madrid, Spain with an exposure time of […]
NASA claims we’ll find aliens in the next 10 to 20 years – and now the agency is revving up its efforts to track them down. The group has put together a team of ‘extraterrestrial experts’ to see if any of the planets discovered outside our solar system are habitable. …The initiative, dubbed Nexus for […]
[FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, CLICK ON IMAGE, Credit & Copyright: Martin Pugh] While most spiral galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have two or more spiral arms, NGC 4725 has only one. In this sharp color composite image, the solo spira mirabilis seems to wind from a prominent ring of bluish, newborn star clusters and red […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Babak Tafreshi (TWAN)] In the coming days, Venus shines near the western horizon at sunset. To find Earth’s sister planet in twilight skies just look for the brilliant evening star. Tonight very close to the Pleiades star cluster, Venus dominates this springtime night skyscape taken only a few days […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA] It was late in the northern martian spring when the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spied this local denizen. Tracking across the flat, dust-covered Amazonis Planitia in 2012, the core of this whirling dust devil is about 140 meters in diameter. […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, NASA, ESA, Hubble] The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured above is one of the densest clusters known – it contains thousands of galaxies. Each of these galaxies houses billions of stars – just as our own Milky Way Galaxy does. Although nearby when compared to most other clusters, light […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Voyager 2, NASA] Two hours before [its] closest approach to Neptune in 1989, the Voyager 2 robot spacecraft snapped this picture. Clearly visible for the first time were long light-colored cirrus-type clouds floating high in Neptune’s atmosphere. Shadows of these clouds can even be seen on lower cloud decks. […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Sergei Makurin] You may have heard of the Seven Sisters in the sky, but have you heard about the Seven Strong Men on the ground? Located just west of the Ural Mountains, the unusual Manpupuner rock formations are one of the Seven Wonders of Russia. How these ancient 40-meter […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Rogelio Bernal Andreo, Deep Sky Colors Sweeping north in planet Earth’s sky, Comet Lovejoy’s greenish coma and blue tinted ion tail stretched across this field of stars in the constellation Taurus on Jan. 13. The inset at the upper left shows the 1/2 degree angular size of the full […]