Lunar Eclipse over a Skyscraper
22.11.2021

Why is the Moon on top of this building? Planning. It took the astrophotographer careful planning -- including figuring out exactly where to place the camera and exactly when to take the shot -- to create this striking superposition.

SGR 1900+14 : Magnetar
3.09.1998

On August 27th an intense flash of X-rays and gamma-rays swept through our Solar System. Five spacecraft of the Third InterPlanetary gamma-ray burst Network, Ulysses, WIND, RXTE, NEAR, and BeppoSAX, recorded the high energy...

Star Forming Region LH 95
12.03.2008

How do stars form? To better understand this complex and chaotic process, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to image in unprecedented detail the star forming region LH 95 in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy.

Inside the Coma Cluster of Galaxies
16.06.2008

Almost every object in the above photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured above is one of the densest clusters known - it contains thousands of galaxies. Each of these galaxies houses billions of stars - just as our own Milky Way Galaxy does.

Spokes Reappear on Saturns Rings
2.06.2009

What causes the mysterious spokes in Saturn's rings? Visible in the above image as light ghostlike impressions, spokes were first discovered by the Voyager spacecraft that buzzed by Saturn in the early 1980s. Their existence was unexpected.

Farther Along
6.05.2011

What is humanity's most distant spacecraft? Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 now holds that distinction at 17.5 billion kilometers from the Sun. That corresponds to 16 light-hours or 117 Astronomical Units (AU). This...

A Horseshoe Einstein Ring from Hubble
21.12.2011

What's large and blue and can wrap itself around an entire galaxy? A gravitational lens mirage. Pictured above, the gravity of a luminous red galaxy (LRG) has gravitationally distorted the light from a much more distant blue galaxy.

Arp 240: A Bridge between Spiral Galaxies from Hubble
28.11.2016

Why is there a bridge between these two spiral galaxies? Made of gas and stars, the bridge provides strong evidence that these two immense star systems have passed close to each other and experienced violent tides induced by mutual gravity.

IC 418: The Spirograph Nebula
11.06.2017

What is creating the strange texture of IC 418? Dubbed the Spirograph Nebula for its resemblance to drawings from a cyclical drawing tool, planetary nebula IC 418 shows patterns that are not well understood. Perhaps they are related to chaotic winds from the variable central star, which changes brightness unpredictably in just a few hours.

Hubbles Jupiter and the Shrinking Great Red Spot
25.04.2018

What will become of Jupiter's Great Red Spot? Gas giant Jupiter is the solar system's largest world with about 320 times the mass of planet Earth. Jupiter is home to one of the largest and longest lasting storm systems known, the Great Red Spot (GRS), visible to the left.