High Energy Stereoscopic System II
27.07.2012

The largest of its kind, the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) II telescope stands in the foreground of this photo. Tilted horizontally it reflects the inverted landscape of the Namibian desert in a segmented mirror 24 meters wide and 32 meters tall, equal in area to two tennis courts.

Curiosity Rover at Rocknest on Mars
27.12.2012

What's in this smooth soil on Mars? In late October, NASA's robotic Curiosity rover stopped near a place dubbed Rocknest as it continues to explore Gale Crater on Mars. Rocknest is the group of stones seen near the top left of the above image -- just to the left of Curiosity's mast.

The Cats Eye Nebula in Optical and X-ray
7.11.2021

To some it looks like a cat's eye. To others, perhaps like a giant cosmic conch shell. It is actually one of brightest and most highly detailed planetary nebula known, composed of gas expelled in the brief yet glorious phase near the end of life of a Sun-like star.

A Cosmic Call to Nearby Stars
9.01.2001

If you could send a message to an alien civilization, what would you say? The people from the Cosmic Call project sent the above image as the first page of a longer message. The message was broadcast toward local stars by a radio telescope in

X Ray Stars of 47 Tucanae
24.05.2001

A deep optical image (left) of 47 Tucanae shows an ancient globular star cluster so dense and crowded that individual stars can not be distinguished in its closely packed core. An x-ray image of its central regions (inset right) from the Chandra Observatory reveals a wealth of x-ray stars hidden there.

Cluster Crash Illuminates Dark Matter Conundrum
20.08.2007

Huge clusters of galaxies are surely colliding in Abell 520 but astrophysicists aren't sure why the dark matter is becoming separated from the normal matter. The dark matter in the above multi-wavelength image is shown in false blue, determined by carefully detailing how the cluster distorts light emitted by more distant galaxies.

Cygnus X: The Inner Workings of a Nearby Star Factory
18.01.2012

How do stars form? To help study this complex issue, astronomers took a deep infrared image of Cygnus X, the largest known star forming region in the entire Milky Way Galaxy. The above recently-released...

Leaving Vesta
19.09.2012

Next stop: Ceres. Last week the robotic Dawn spacecraft ended its year-long mission to asteroid Vesta, becoming the first spacecraft ever to visit this far off world located between Mars and Jupiter, in the Solar System's main asteroid belt.

A 212 Hour Exposure of Orion
29.03.2020

The constellation of Orion is much more than three stars in a row. It is a direction in space that is rich with impressive nebulas. To better appreciate this well-known swath of sky, an extremely long exposure was taken over many clear nights in 2013 and 2014.

Moon Crashers
15.10.1999

On July 31, 1964, Ranger 7 crashed into the Moon. Seventeen minutes before impact it snapped this picture - the first image of the Moon ever taken by a U.S. spacecraft. Of course Ranger 7 was intended to crash, transmitting close-up pictures of the lunar surface during its final moments.