Infrared Portrait of the Large Magellanic Cloud
14.01.2016

Cosmic dust clouds ripple across this infrared portrait of our Milky Way's satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. In fact, the remarkable composite image from the Herschel Space Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope show that dust clouds fill this neighboring dwarf galaxy, much like dust along the plane of the Milky Way itself.

Olympus Mons Volcano on Mars
29.05.2000

Scroll right to virtually climb the largest volcano in the Solar System. Olympus Mons on Mars measures three times higher than Earth's highest mountain, and has a volume over fifty times greater than Earth's largest volcano. The caldera at the top is over 70 kilometers wide.

The Long Jet of Pictor A
19.06.2000

A jet stretching nearly a million light years has been imaged emanating from galaxy Pictor A. The thin jet of electrons and protons shoots out at nearly light-speed likely from the vicinity of a large black hole at the galaxy center.

24 Million Kilometers to Saturn
31.05.2004

Next stop: Saturn. The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft is approaching Saturn and will fire its engines to break into orbit around the ringed giant on July 1. The robot spacecraft was launched in 1997 and rounded Jupiter in 2001.

3I/ATLAS Flyby
26.12.2025

Attention grabbing interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS made its not-so-close flyby of our fair planet on December 19 at a distance of 1.8 astronomical units. That's about 900 light-seconds. This deep exposure captures the comet...

Near the Nucleus of Hyakutake
28.03.1996

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the near-nuclear region of Comet Hyakutake on March 25 as the comet approached within 9.3 million miles of the Earth. It covers a relatively "small" 2,000 mile wide area with the sunward direction toward the lower right (tailward is upper left).

M51: X Rays from the Whirlpool
10.06.2014

What if we X-rayed an entire spiral galaxy? This was done (again) recently by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory for the nearby interacting galaxies known as the Whirlpool (M51). Hundreds of glittering x-ray stars are present in the above Chandra image of the spiral and its neighbor.

Virtual Flight Over Asteroid Vesta
14.05.2012

What would it be like to fly over the asteroid Vesta? Animators from the German Aerospace Center recently took actual images and height data from NASA's Dawn mission currently visiting Vesta to generate such a virtual movie.

Summer at the South Pole
23.12.2000

The December solstice brings the beginning of Winter to Earth's Northern Hemisphere and Summer time to the South! This view of Earth's Southern Hemisphere near the beginning of Summer was created using images from the Galileo spacecraft taken during its December 1990 flyby of our fair planet.

Hale-Bopp in Stereo
4.04.1997

This stereo pair of Hale-Bopp images combines two pictures from slightly different viewing angles. Simulating stereo vision, the difference was generated by the comet's apparent motion as it cruised through the inner Solar System.