Gravity s Grin
10.05.2022

Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, published over 100 years ago, predicted the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. And that's what gives these distant galaxies such a whimsical appearance, seen through the looking glass of X-ray and optical image data from the Chandra and Hubble space telescopes.

APOD: 2023 January 30 Б Globular Star Cluster NGC 6355 from Hubble
29.01.2023

Globular clusters once ruled the Milky Way. Back in the old days, back when our Galaxy first formed, perhaps thousands of globular clusters roamed our Galaxy. Today, there are less than 200 left. Over the eons, many globular clusters were destroyed by repeated fateful encounters with each other or the Galactic center.

APOD: 2023 May 16 Б Total Eclipse: The Big Corona
15.05.2023

Most photographs don't adequately portray the magnificence of the Sun's corona. Seeing the corona first-hand during a total solar eclipse is unparalleled. The human eye can adapt to see coronal features and extent that average cameras usually cannot. Welcome, however, to the digital age.

APOD: 2023 October 17 Б PDS 70: Disk, Planets, and Moons
16.10.2023

It's not the big ring that's attracting the most attention. Although the big planet-forming ring around the star PDS 70 is clearly imaged and itself quite interesting. It's also not the planet on the right, just inside the big disk, thatБs being talked about the most.

APOD: 2025 June 15 Б Two Worlds One Sun
14.06.2025

How different does sunset appear from Mars than from Earth? For comparison, two images of our common star were taken at sunset, one from Earth and one from Mars. These images were scaled to have the same angular width and are featured here side-by-side.

APOD: 2026 June 9 Б Thors Helmet
8.06.2026

Thor not only has his own day (Thursday), but a helmet in the heavens. Popularly called Thor's Helmet, NGC 2359 is a hat-shaped cosmic cloud with wing-like appendages. Heroically sized even for a Norse god, Thor's Helmet is about 30 light-years across.

Perseids Over a Little Planet
11.08.2026

It looks like a view from the Little Prince's planet. The featured image is a throwback to the 2024 Perseid meteor shower, surrounded in this projection by the Bieszczady Mountains in Poland. Visible...

A Note on the Perseus Cluster
12.09.2003

A truly enormous collection of thousands of galaxies, the Perseus Cluster - like other large galaxy clusters - is filled with hot, x-ray emitting gas. The x-ray hot gas (not the individual galaxies) appears in the left panel above, a false color image from the Chandra Observatory.

Neptune: Still Springtime After All These Years
26.06.2004

In the 1960s spring came to the southern hemisphere of Neptune, the Solar System's outermost gas giant planet. Of course, since Neptune orbits the Sun once every 165 earth-years, it's still springtime for southern Neptune, where each season lasts over four decades.

Celebrating Hubble With NGC 6751
7.04.2000

Planetary nebulae do look simple, round, and planet-like in small telescopes. But images from the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope have become well known for showing these fluorescent gas shrouds of dying Sun-like stars to possess a staggering variety of detailed symmetries and shapes.