Jupiter's Great Dark Spot
19.03.2003

Seventeenth century astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini was an astute observer of Jupiter's Great Red Spot. So it seems only fitting that his namesake, the Cassini spacecraft, has enabled detailed observations of another planet-sized blemish -- Jupiter's Great Dark Spot.

Neon Saturn
13.03.2016

If seen in the right light, Saturn glows like a neon sign. Although Saturn has comparatively little of the element neon, a composite image false-colored in three bands of infrared light highlights features of the giant ringed planet like a glowing sign.

Flying Over Plutos Moon Charon
22.02.2016

Given some poetic license, there is now scientific evidence that hell has frozen over. To start, Greek mythology holds that Charon is the ferryman of the underworld. Next, recent analysis of data taken...

Lewins Challenge: 360 Degree Star Trails
17.07.2011

You could be the first person ever to take a real single-exposure image like this. The above image from Vienna, Austria is not real in the sense that the 360 degree star trails in the sky appear only because of a digital trick.

A Tale of Two Hemispheres
30.07.2011

A quest to find planet Earth's darkest night skies led to this intriguing panorama. In projection, the mosaic view sandwiches the horizons visible in all-sky images taken from the northern hemisphere's Canary Island of La Palma (top) and the south's high Atacama Desert between the two hemispheres of the Milky Way Galaxy.

The Magnetic Carpet Of The Sun
6.11.1997

The Sun has a magnetic carpet. Its visible surface appears to be carpeted with tens of thousands of magnetic north and south poles joined by looping field lines which extend outward into the Solar Corona.

The Magnetic Carpet Of The Sun
24.10.1999

The Sun has a magnetic carpet. Its visible surface appears to be carpeted with tens of thousands of magnetic north and south poles joined by looping field lines which extend outward into the Solar Corona.

Jovian Aurora
23.01.1998

These two recently released Hubble Space Telescope close-ups show the Northern and Southern lights ... on Jupiter. Like aurora on Earth, these Jovian aurora are caused by charged particles funneled into the atmosphere above the planet's North (right) and South poles by magnetic fields.

Star Trails and the Bracewell Radio Sundial
13.07.2018

Sundials use the location of a shadow to measure the Earth's rotation and indicate the time of day. So it's fitting that this sundial, at the Very Large Array Radio Telescope Observatory in New Mexico, commemorates the history of radio astronomy and radio astronomy pioneer Ronald Bracewell.

Optical Transient Near GRB970508 Shows Distant Redshift
13.05.1997

The GRB distance scale controversy may have just ended with a flash. Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) are powerful explosions occurring in seemingly random positions on the sky. They are so featureless and so poorly resolved, however, that their distances could not be determined.