APOD: 2023 March 27 Б Aurora Over Arctic Henge
27.03.2023

Reports of powerful solar flares started a seven-hour quest north to capture modern monuments against an aurora-filled sky. The peaks of iconic Arctic Henge in Raufarhцfn in northern Iceland were already aligned with the stars: some are lined up toward the exact north from one side and toward exact south from the other.

APOD: 2026 January 11 Б M104: The Sombrero Galaxy in Infrared
11.01.2026

This floating ring is the size of a galaxy. In fact, it is a galaxy -- or at least part of one: the photogenic Sombrero Galaxy, one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo Cluster of Galaxies.

Inside the Eagle Nebula
3.02.2012

In 1995, a now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula. This remarkable false-color composite image revisits the nearby stellar nursery with image data from the orbiting Herschel Space Observatory and XMM-Newton telescopes.

Galactic Supernova Remnant IC 443
21.07.1999

About 8000 years ago, a star in our Galaxy exploded. Ancient humans might have noticed the supernova as a temporary star, but modern humans can see the expanding shell of gas even today.

NEAR Spacecraft Survives Landing on Asteroid Eros
13.02.2001

Yesterday NEAR-Shoemaker became the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid and send signals back from its surface. Since the robot spacecraft was not designed for such a contingency, the success of the landing on asteroid 433

Mars Pathfinder Super Pan
10.10.1997

Spectacular details of rover tracks, wind-driven soil, and textured rocks on the Martian surface fill this color mosaic. The view is north-northeast from the Sagan Memorial Station at the Pathfinder landing site on Mars.

Razorbacks in Endurance Crater
27.07.2004

Over one year after its launch, robot geologist Opportunity has been spending recent sols on Mars inching its way down the slopes of Endurance crater. Littered with martian blueberries, some flat rocks within the crater also seem to have surprising razorbacks -- narrow slabs sticking up along their edges.

Iapetus in Black and White
14.09.2007

Iapetus, Saturn's third largest moon, is a candidate for the strangest moon of Saturn. Tidally locked in its orbit around the ringed gas giant, Iapetus is sometimes called the yin-yang moon because...

NGC 2442: Galaxy in Volans
25.03.2010

Distorted galaxy NGC 2442 can be found in the southern constellation of the flying fish, (Piscis) Volans. Located about 50 million light-years away, the galaxy's two spiral arms extending from a pronounced central bar have a hook-like appearance in wide-field images.

Deep Orion Over the Canary Islands
23.01.2012

Which attracts your eye more -- the sky or the ground? On the ground are rocky peaks in Teide National Park on Tenerife Island of the Spanish Canary Islands off the northwestern coast of Africa. The volcanic landscape features old island summits and is sometimes used as a testbed for instruments on future Martian rovers.