Curiosity on Mars: A Wall of Gale Crater
15.08.2012

If you could stand on Mars, what would you see? The above image is a digitally re-colored approximation of what you might see if the above Martian landscape had occurred on Earth. Images from...

Melotte 15 in the Heart
18.10.2014

Cosmic clouds form fantastic shapes in the central regions of emission nebula IC 1805. The clouds are sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from massive hot stars in the nebula's newborn star cluster, Melotte 15.

Orion over Argentine Mountains
9.06.2020

Do you recognize the constellation of Orion? It may be harder than usual in today's featured image because the camera has zoomed in on the center, and the exposure is long enough to enhance nebulas beyond what the unaided human eye can see.

Messier 24: Sagittarius Star Cloud
7.04.2022

Unlike most entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog of deep sky objects, M24 is not a bright galaxy, star cluster, or nebula. It's a gap in nearby, obscuring interstellar dust clouds that allows a view of the distant stars in the Sagittarius spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy.

AR 9169: A Large Sunspot
25.09.2000

One of the largest sunspots in recent years is now crossing our Sun. Dominating active region AR 9169, the sunspot is the large dark complex visible below (west) and right of center in the above photograph of our Sun taken last Thursday.

Ganymede: A Really Groovy Moon
11.07.1996

Ganymede's surface is a wrinkled mess. As large ice-sheets shift on the moon's surface, parts of the surface buckle causing high ridges, deep furrows, and parallel grooves. This photo, taken by the Galileo spacecraft currently orbiting Jupiter, was released yesterday. The large circular feature near the picture bottom is a large impact crater.

7,000 Stars And The Milky Way
23.05.1998

This panorama view of the sky is really a drawing. It was made in the 1950s under the supervision of astronomer Knut Lundmark at the Lund Observatory in Sweden. To create the picture, draftsmen...

SOHO Composite: Coronal Mass Ejection
20.08.1998

This complex composite image of an ominous and spectacular event - an expanding storm of energetic particles from the Sun - was constructed using data recorded by the SOHO spacecraft on November 6, 1997. Four images...

A Disk and Jet in Haro 6-5B
11.02.1999

Planets condense from disks. Several new Hubble Space Telescope pictures of stars surrounded by disks were released earlier this week. Since the glare of the central star usually makes a surrounding disk hard...

Thin Rings Around Polarized Saturn
19.12.2005

How thin are the rings of Saturn? Brightness measurements from different angles have shown Saturn's rings to be about one kilometer thick, making them many times thinner, in relative proportion, than a razor blade. This thinness sometimes appears in dramatic fashion during an image taken nearly along the ring plane.