Northern Winter Night
25.12.2020

Orion always seems to come up sideways on northern winter evenings. Those familiar stars of the constellation of the Hunter are caught above the trees in this colorful night skyscape. Not a star at all but still visible to eye, the Great Nebula of Orion shines below the Hunter's belt stars.

Jupiters Two Largest Storms Nearly Collide
25.07.2006

Two storms systems larger than Earth are nearly colliding right now on planet Jupiter. No one was sure what would happen, but so far both storms have survived. In the above false-color infrared image...

Eagle Castle
30.07.1997

What lights up this castle of star formation? The familiar Eagle Nebula glows much like a neon sign, but in many colors at once. The above photograph is a composite of three of these glowing gas colors.

A Martian Lake Bed
11.12.1997

Look closely. In this Mars Global Surveyor image of the Martian surface just south of Schiaparelli crater, dark lines appear to criss-cross light colored depressions. One tantalizing possibility is simply that the feature near...

The Pillars of Eagle Castle
14.07.2013

What lights up this castle of star formation? The familiar Eagle Nebula glows bright in many colors at once. The above image is a composite of three of these glowing gas colors. Pillars of dark dust nicely outline some of the denser towers of star formation.

Sunset Afterimage
31.05.2025

On May 7, the Sun setting behind a church bell tower was captured in this filtered and manipulated digital skyscape from Ragusa, Sicily, planet Earth. In this version of the image the colors look bizarre.

Burns Cliff Anaglyph
4.08.2006

Get out your red/blue glasses and gaze across Burns Cliff along the inner wall of Endurance crater on Mars! The view from the perspective of Mars rover Opportunity is a color anaglyph - two different images are presented to the left and right eyes by color filters to produce the 3D effect.

A Floral Aurora Corona
28.07.2009

Few auroras show this level of detail. Above, a standard digital camera captured a particularly active and colorful auroral corona that occurred last week above Alberta, Canada. With a shape reminiscent of a flower, the spectacular aurora had an unusually high degree of detail.

A Scorpio Sky Spectacular
11.09.2007

If Scorpio looked this good to the unaided eye, humans might remember it better. Scorpio more typically appears as a few bright stars in a well known but rarely pointed out zodiacal constellation. To get a spectacular image like this, though, one needs a good camera, color filters, and a digital image processor.

The Merope Reflection Nebula
11.06.2007

Reflection nebulas reflect light from a nearby star. Many small carbon grains in the nebula reflect the light. The blue color typical of reflection nebula is caused by blue light being more efficiently scattered by the carbon dust than red light.