The Windmill s Moon
9.01.2015

Seen from the Canary Island of Fuerteventura, this bright Full Moon rose at sunset. Reaching its full phase on the night of January 4/5, it was the first Full Moon of the new year and the first to follow December's solstice.

Sentinels of a Northern Sky
10.01.2017

Who guards the north? The featured picture was taken last March in Finnish Lapland where weather can include sub-freezing temperatures and driving snow. Surreal landscapes sometimes result, where white alien-looking sentinels seem to patrol the landscape.

CG4: A Ruptured Cometary Globule
6.12.1998

The odd looking "creature" to the right of center in the above photo is a gas cloud known as a cometary globule. This globule, however, has ruptured. Cometary globules are typically characterized by dusty heads and elongated tails.

CG4: A Ruptured Cometary Globule
28.12.1996

The odd looking "creature" to the right of center in the above photo is a gas cloud known as a cometary globule. This globule, however, has ruptured. Cometary globules are typically characterized by dusty heads and elongated tails.

The Great Nebula in Orion
27.01.1998

The Great Nebula in Orion can be found just below and to the left of the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. This fuzzy patch contains one of the closest stellar nurseries, lying at a distance of about 1500 light years.

Mars: A Mist In Mariner Valley
17.10.1997

An icy mist and late afternoon clouds cover much of this section of Valles Marineris on Mars. The Valles Marineris or Mariner Valley is a huge canyon system about 2,000 miles long and up to 5 miles deep.

Apollo 12 Visits Surveyor 3
8.10.1995

Apollo 12 was the second mission to land humans on the Moon. The landing site was picked to be near the location of Surveyor 3, a robot spacecraft that had landed on the moon three years earlier. Pictured above, Apollo 12 astronauts Conrad and Bean retrieve parts from the Surveyor.

Cracks and Ridges on Europa
10.03.1998

Which way to the interstate? What appears to be a caricature of a complex highway system on Earth is actually a system of ridges and cracks on the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa. The distance between parallel ridges in the above photograph is typically about 1 kilometer.

Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1365
19.05.1997

Many spiral galaxies have bars across their centers. Even our own Milky Way Galaxy is thought to have a bar, but perhaps not so prominent as the one in NGC 1365, shown above. The persistence and motion of the bar imply relatively massive spiral arms.

The Shuttle Launches an Inflatable Antenna
25.05.1996

High above the Earth the Space Shuttle Endeavor launches a new type of instrument - an inflatable antenna. The officially designated Inflatable Antenna Experiment was released Monday, May 20th, as part of a Spartan satellite - which contains many scientific experiments. The antenna is roughly the size of a tennis court and is even visible from Earth.