Fly Over Dwarf Planet Ceres
10.06.2015

What would it look like to fly over dwarf planet Ceres? Animators from the German Aerospace Center recently took actual images and height data from NASA's robotic Dawn mission -- currently visiting Ceres -- to generate several fascinating virtual sequences.

Apollo 14 Heads for Home
5.02.2021

Fifty years ago this Sunday (February 7, 1971), the crew of Apollo 14 left lunar orbit and headed for home. They watched this Earthrise from their command module Kittyhawk. With Earth's sunlit crescent just peeking over the lunar horizon, the cratered terrain in the foreground is along the lunar farside.

APOD: 2023 February 8 Б Stellar Wind Shaped Nebula RCW 58
8.02.2023

Imagine traveling to a star about 100 times as massive as our Sun, a million times more luminous, and with 30 times the surface temperature. Such stars exist, and some are known as Wolf Rayet (WR) stars, named after French astronomers Charles Wolf and Georges Rayet.

APOD: 2025 July 15 Б Collapse in Hebes Chasma on Mars
15.07.2025

What's happened in Hebes Chasma on Mars? Hebes Chasma is a depression just north of the enormous Valles Marineris canyon. Since the depression is unconnected to other surface features, it is unclear where the internal material went.

APOD: 2025 December 7 Б The Sun and Its Missing Colors
7.12.2025

It is still not known why the Sun's light is missing some colors. Here are all the visible colors of the Sun, produced by passing the Sun's light through a prism-like device.

Sunbather
11.01.2002

Intense and overwhelming, the direct glare of the Sun is blocked by the smooth disk centered in this image from the sun-staring SOHO spacecraft. Taken on January 8, the picture shows streamers of solar wind billowing radially outward for millions of kilometers above the Sun's surface indicated by the white circle.

Explosions Discovered Near Galactic Center
28.02.1996

Tremendous explosions near the center of our Galaxy were discovered just this past December and are being announced today by a paper in Nature and a press conference at NASA. Bursts like these have...

X Ray Moon
14.09.2002

This x-ray image of the Moon was made by the orbiting ROSAT (Röntgensatellit) Observatory in 1990. In this digital picture, pixel brightness corresponds to x-ray intensity. Consider the image in three parts: the bright hemisphere of the x-ray moon, the darker half of the moon, and the x-ray sky background.

Mars Through a Small Telescope
19.08.2003

How does Mars appear through a small telescope? Viewed with the unaided eye or through a small telescope, possibly the most striking part of Mars' appearance is it's red color. The color derives from rust, iron oxide, which composes perhaps 10% of the Martian soil.

Resolving Mira
11.10.1998

Most stars appear only as points of light. Early last year, Betelgeuse became the second star, after our Sun, to have it surface resolved. Later last year, Mira was added to the list. Mira...