Live: Watching for Venus to Cross the Sun
5.06.2012

Today Venus moves in front of the Sun. One way to follow this rare event is to actively reload the above live image of the Sun during the right time interval and look for an unusual circular dark dot. The smaller sprawling dark areas are sunspots. The circular dot is the planet Venus.

Saturn: Bright Tethys and Ancient Rings
16.09.2012

How old are Saturn's rings? No one is quite sure. One possibility is that the rings formed relatively recently in our Solar System's history, perhaps only about 100 million years ago when a moon-sized object broke up near Saturn.

MAGIC NEOWISE
24.07.2020

The multi-mirror, 17 meter-diameter MAGIC telescopes reflect this starry night sky from the Roque de los Muchachos European Northern Observatory on the Canary Island of La Palma. MAGIC stands for Major Atmospheric Gamma Imaging...

Webb s First Deep Field
13.07.2022

This is the deepest, sharpest infrared image of the cosmos so far. The view of the early Universe toward the southern constellation Volans was achieved in 12.5 hours of exposure with the NIRCam instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope. Of course the stars with six visible spikes are well within our own Milky Way.

APOD: 2023 September 17 Б Moon Mountains Magnified during Ring of Fire Eclipse
17.09.2023

What are those dark streaks in this composite image of a solar eclipse? They are reversed shadows of mountains at the edge of the Moon. The center image, captured from Xiamen, China, has the Moon's center directly in front of the Sun's center.

Galileo s Europa
29.03.2024

Looping through the Jovian system in the late 1990s, the Galileo spacecraft recorded stunning views of Europa and uncovered evidence that the moon's icy surface likely hides a deep, global ocean. Galileo...

Sunshine, Earthshine at the Lunar Limb
30.05.1996

This dramatic image of the Moon's edge against a background of distant stars is from a perspective impossible for groundbased telescopes. It was taken by a star tracker camera onboard the Clementine spacecraft.

Astronomy Quilt of the Week
17.10.2003

Demonstrating her mastery of a traditional astronomical imaging technique quilter and astronomy enthusiast Judy Ross has produced this spectacular compostion of "Astronomy Quilt Piece of the Week". Her year-long effort resulted in an arrangement...

A Quadruple Sky Over Great Salt Lake
13.09.2005

This was a sky to show the kids. All in all, three children, three planets, the Moon, a star, an airplane and a mom were all captured in one image near Great Salt Lake in Utah, USA on September 6.

Astronomy Quilt of the Week
16.10.2005

Demonstrating her mastery of a traditional astronomical imaging technique quilter and astronomy enthusiast Judy Ross has produced this spectacular composition of "Astronomy Quilt Piece of the Week". Her year-long effort resulted in an arrangement...