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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
Comet Hale-Bopp Passes M14
11.11.1996
Comet Hale-Bopp continues its slow trek across the night sky, and can now be seen superposed near the bright globular cluster M14. Will Comet Hale-Bopp become as bright in early 1997 as Comet Hyakutake did in early 1996? It is still too early to tell.
NGC 4755: A Jewel Box of Stars
10.11.1996
The great variety of star colors in this open cluster underlie it's name: The Jewel Box. The bright central star Kappa Crucis is red, in contrast to the many blue stars that surround it. The cluster contains just over 100 stars, and might be no older than 10 million years.
Columbia Launches
9.11.1996
Rocket engines blazing, the Space Shuttle Columbia arcs into Florida's morning sky after lifting off from pad 39-A at Kennedy Space Center. Seen here in January of 1996, this space shuttle has been...
Surveyor Hops
8.11.1996
This panorama of the cratered lunar surface was constructed from images returned by the US Surveyor 6 lander. Surveyor 6 was not the first spacecraft to accomplish a soft landing on the Moon ... but it was the first to land and then lift off again!
A Solar Corona Ejection
7.11.1996
The Sun would not be a nice place to spend the summer. One reason, besides the extreme heat, is that explosions are common there. In the above picture, magnetic fields buckle releasing previously constrained hot material from the upper atmosphere of the Sun.
Fields of Minerals on Ganymede
6.11.1996
What treasures lie on the surface of Ganymede? Last week, NASA released a map of Jupiter's largest moon made by the Galileo Orbiter highlighting ice and minerals deposits. The leftmost photograph by Voyager...
Elliptical Galaxy NGC 4881 in Coma
5.11.1996
Elliptical galaxies are unlike spiral galaxies and hence unlike our own Milky Way Galaxy. The giant elliptical galaxy named NGC 4881 on the upper left lies at the edge of the giant Coma Cluster of Galaxies.
The Coma Cluster of Galaxies
4.11.1996
Almost every object in the above photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured is one of the densest clusters known - it contains thousands of galaxies. Each of these galaxies house billions of stars - just like our own Milky Way Galaxy.
The Martian Spring
3.11.1996
As spring comes to the northern latitudes of Mars, increased solar heating brings warmth and a change in the weather. The winds produced by the large temperature differences between the receding polar...
Surveyor Night Launch
2.11.1996
In early November of 1967, a dramatic night launch of an Atlas Centaur rocket from Cape Canaveral lofted the successful Surveyor 6 spacecraft toward the Moon. The Surveyor series of robotic probes carried out the first US lunar soft landings in preparation for the Apollo program.
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