APOD: 2024 April 28 Б Rings Around the Ring Nebula
28.04.2024

The Ring Nebula (M57) is more complicated than it appears through a small telescope. The easily visible central ring is about one light-year across, but this remarkably deep exposure - a collaborative effort combining data from three different large telescopes - explores the looping filaments of glowing gas extending much farther from the nebula's central star.

APOD: 2025 June 30 Б NGC 4651: The Umbrella Galaxy
30.06.2025

It's raining stars. What appears to be a giant cosmic umbrella is now known to be a tidal stream of stars stripped from a small satellite galaxy. The main galaxy, spiral galaxy...

APOD: 2026 July 27 Б NGC 7635: The Bubble Nebula
27.07.2026

What created this huge space bubble? Blown by the wind from a star, this tantalizing, head-like apparition is cataloged as NGC 7635, but known simply as the Bubble Nebula. Taken from Krakow, Poland, the featured view utilizes a long exposure to reveal the intricate details of this cosmic bubble and its environment.

Moonset Over Pleasant Bay
29.03.2010

It was a sky for the imagination. In the early evening last week, the sky illuminating the unaided eye was perhaps even more illuminating to the mind's eye. The unaided eye saw clouds...

Naked Eye Nova Centauri 2013
7.12.2013

Brightest stellar beacons of the constellation Centaurus, Alpha and Beta Centauri are easy to spot from the southern hemisphere. For now, so is new naked eye Nova Centauri 2013. In this night skyscape recorded...

Stripping ESO 137 001
28.03.2014

Spiral galaxy ESO 137-001 hurtles through massive galaxy cluster Abell 3627 some 220 million light years away. The distant galaxy is seen in this colorful Hubble/Chandra composite image through a foreground of the Milky Way's stars toward the southern constellation Triangulum Australe.

Trifid Pillars and Jets
8.06.1999

Dust pillars are like interstellar mountains. They survive because they are more dense than their surroundings, but they are being slowly eroded away by a hostile environment. Visible in the above picture...

Wind from a Black Hole
1.07.2006

Binary star system GRO J1655-40 consists of a relatively normal star about twice as massive as the Sun co-orbiting with a black hole of about seven solar masses. This striking artist's vision of the exotic binary system helps visualize matter drawn from the normal star by gravity and swirling toward the black hole.

The W4 Chimney
7.02.2000

A huge chimney venting hot clouds of gas out from the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy has recently been imaged in radio waves. The Canadian Galactic Plane Survey team used an array of radio telescopes to survey an ionized gas region known as W4.

NGC 2683: Spiral Edge On
11.10.2010

Does spiral galaxy NGC 2683 have a bar across its center? Being so nearly like our own barred Milky Way Galaxy, one might guess it has. Being so nearly edge-on, however, it is hard to tell.