Sedna at Noon
4.06.2004

Standing on Sedna - the solar system's most distant known planetoid - your view of the Sun at high noon might look something like this. An artist's dramatic vision, the picture shows the Sun suspended above the nearby horizon as a bright star immersed in the dusty ecliptic plane.

Pastel Planet, Triple Eclipse
11.11.2004

This false-color image of banded gas giant Jupiter shows a triple eclipse in progress on March 28 - a relatively rare event, even for a large planet with many moons. Captured by the Hubble Space...

Sculpting the South Pillar
2.06.2005

Eta Carinae, one of the most massive and unstable stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, has a profound affect on its environment. Found in the the South Pillar region of the Carina Nebula, these...

Comet ISON Being Destroyed by the Sun
2.11.2015

Most comets don't survive a close encounter with the Sun. Two years ago this month, though, Comet ISON was thought by some to be big enough to withstand its perilous sungrazing dive. The featured video shows the drama as it was recorded by NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite.

Fermi Science Playoffs
8.06.2018

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope was launched into orbit on June 11th, 2008. Its instruments detect gamma-rays -- light that is thousands to hundreds of billions of times more energetic than what we see with our eyes.

Robotic Dragonfly Selected to Fly Across Titan
3.07.2019

If you could fly across Titan, what would you see? To find out and to better explore this exotic moon of Saturn, NASA recently green-lighted Dragonfly, a mission to Titan with plans to deploy a helicopter-like drone.

APOD: 2023 June 13 Б Moons Across Jupiter
13.06.2023

Jupiter's moons circle Jupiter. The featured video depicts Europa and Io, two of Jupiter's largest moons, crossing in front of the grand planet's Great Red Spot, the largest known storm system in our Solar System.

APOD: 2024 September 29 Б Seven Dusty Sisters
29.09.2024

Is this really the famous Pleiades star cluster? Known for its iconic blue stars, the Pleiades is shown here in infrared light where the surrounding dust outshines the stars. Here, three infrared colors have been mapped into visual colors (R=24, G=12, B=4.6 microns).

A Close Up of Aurora on Jupiter
19.12.2000

Jupiter has aurorae. Like Earth, the magnetic field of the gas giant funnels charged particles released from the Sun onto the poles. As these particles strike the atmosphere, electrons are temporarily knocked away from existing gas molecules. Electric force attracts these electrons back. As the electrons recombine to remake neutral molecules, auroral light is emitted.

Apollo 17's Moonship
6.01.2001

Awkward and angular looking, Apollo 17's lunar module Challenger was designed for flight in the vacuum of space. This sharp picture from the command module America, shows Challenger's ascent stage in lunar orbit.