Mammatus Clouds over Mount Rushmore
7.12.2020

What's that below those strange clouds? Presidents. If you look closely, you may recognize the heads of four former US Presidents carved into famous Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, USA. More obvious in the featured image are the unusual mammatus clouds that passed briefly overhead.

A Whale of an Aurora over Swedish Forest
22.03.2022

What's that in the sky? An aurora. A large coronal mass ejection occurred on our Sun earlier this month, throwing a cloud of fast-moving electrons, protons, and ions toward the Earth. Part...

The Keyhole Nebula in Infrared
13.06.2000

About three million years ago, the stars in the Keyhole Nebula began to form. The above picture of the Keyhole Nebula, also known as the Carina Nebula or NGC 3372, shows in infrared light many facets of this dramatic stellar nursery which lies only 9,000 light-years away.

Henize 3 401: An Elongated Planetary Nebula
31.07.2002

How do dying stars eject their outer layers? Stars that create elegant planetary nebulas like Henize 3-401, pictured above, are not unusual, causing speculation that, one day, our own Sun may look like this.

D rad Bacteria: Candidate Astronauts
25.04.2004

These bacteria could survive on another planet. In an Earth lab, Deinococcus radiodurans (D. rad) survive extreme levels of radiation, extreme temperatures, dehydration, and exposure to genotoxic chemicals. Amazingly, they even have the ability to repair their own DNA, usually with 48 hours. Known as an extremophile, bacteria such as D.

Titan Through the Haze
26.10.2004

What are these surface features on Titan? This planet-sized moon of Saturn had much of its south polar surface imaged during an initial flyby by the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft back in early July.

Fresh Tiger Strips on Saturns Enceladus
6.09.2005

The tiger stripes on Saturn's moon Enceladus might be active. Even today, they may be spewing ice from the moon's icy interior into space, creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon's South Pole and creating Saturn's mysterious E-ring.

Giant Cluster Bends, Breaks Images
23.04.2000

What are those strange blue objects? Many are images of a single, unusual, beaded, blue, ring-like galaxy which just happens to line-up behind a giant cluster of galaxies. Cluster galaxies here appear yellow and -- together with the cluster's dark matter -- act as a gravitational lens.

Fast Stars and Rogue Planets in the Orion Nebula
21.03.2017

Start with the constellation of Orion. Below Orion's belt is a fuzzy area known as the Great Nebula of Orion. In this nebula is a bright star cluster known as the Trapezium, marked by four bright stars near the image center.

Night of the Perseids
28.09.2021

Have you ever experienced a meteor shower? To help capture the wonder, a video was taken during the peak of the recent Perseid meteor shower above the Indian Astronomical Observatory in Hanle, India, high up in the Himalayan mountains.