Millions of Stars in Omega Centauri
16.03.2023

Globular star cluster Omega Centauri, also known as NGC 5139, is 15,000 light-years away. The cluster is packed with about 10 million stars much older than the Sun within a volume about 150 light-years in diameter.

Stereo Jupiter near Opposition
24.11.2023

Jupiter looks sharp in these two rooftop telescope images. Both were captured on November 17 from Singapore, planet Earth, about two weeks after Jupiter's 2023 opposition. Climbing high in midnight skies the giant planet was a mere 33.4 light-minutes from Singapore. That's about 4 astronomical units away.

APOD: 2024 June 26 Б Timelapse: Aurora, SAR, and the Milky Way
26.06.2024

What's happening in the sky this unusual night? Most striking in the featured 4.5-hour 360-degree panoramic video, perhaps, is the pink and purple aurora. That's because this night, encompassing May 11, was famous for its auroral skies around the world.

APOD: 2024 September 18 Б The Mermaid Nebula Supernova Remnant
18.09.2024

New stars are born from the remnants of dead stars. The gaseous remnant of the gravitational collapse and subsequent death of a very massive star in our Milky Way created the G296.5+10.0 supernova remnant, of which the featured Mermaid Nebula is part.

Deimos Before Sunrise
24.05.2025

Deimos takes 30 hours and 18 minutes to complete one orbit around the Red Planet. That's a little more than one Martian day or sol which is about 24 hours and 40 minutes long, so Deimos drifts westward across the Martian sky.

Hydrogen, Helium, and the Stars of M10
30.06.2001

Stars like the Sun use hydrogen for fuel, "burning" hydrogen into helium at their cores through nuclear fusion. But what happens when that hydrogen runs out? For a while, hydrogen burns in a shell surrounding the stellar core and the star expands to become a red giant.

Brain Crater on Mars
19.05.2004

What caused this unusual looking crater floor on Mars? Appearing at first glance to resemble the human brain, the natural phenomena that created the unusual texture on the floor of this Martian impact crater are currently under investigation. The light colored region surrounding the brain-textured region is likely sand dunes sculpted by winds.

The Large Cloud of Magellan
2.09.2004

Portuguese navigator Fernando de Magellan and his crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during the first circumnavigation of planet Earth. As a result, two fuzzy cloud-like objects easily visible for southern hemisphere skygazers are known as the Clouds of Magellan.

Crater Wall on Solis Planum
30.09.2004

This dramatic perspective view looks south-east along the wall of a large eroded impact crater on Solis Planum, bordering the mountainous Thaumasia region of Mars. Stretching for about 50 kilometers into the scene, the crater wall is around 800 meters high.

The Crab Nebula from VLT
22.11.1999

The Crab Nebula, filled with mysterious filaments, is the result of a star that was seen to explode in 1054 AD. This spectacular supernova explosion was recorded by Chinese and (quite probably) Anasazi Indian astronomers.