Jupiter Eclipsing Ganymede
6.01.2009

How hazy is Jupiter's upper atmosphere? To help find out, astronomers deployed the Hubble Space Telescope to watch Jupiter eclipse its moon Ganymede. Although Ganymede circles Jupiter once a week, it usually passes above or below the planet, so that a good eclipse occurs more rarely.

Red Aurora Over Australia
29.01.2017

Why would the sky glow red? Aurora. A solar storm in 2012, emanating mostly from active sunspot region 1402, showered particles on the Earth that excited oxygen atoms high in the Earth's atmosphere. As the excited element's electrons fell back to their ground state, they emitted a red glow.

Aurora Over RaufarhЖfn
30.04.2012

It was all lined up even without the colorful aurora exploding overhead. If you follow the apex line of the recently deployed monuments of Arctic Henge in RaufarhЖfn in northern Iceland from this vantage point, you will see that they point due north.

AR1520: Islands in the Photosphere
14.07.2012

Awash in a sea of plasma and anchored in magnetic fields, sunspots are planet-sized, dark islands in the solar photosphere, the bright surface of the Sun. Dark because they are slightly cooler than the surrounding surface, this group of sunspots is captured in a close-up telescopic snapshot from July 11.

Jupiter over 2 Hours and 30 Minutes
19.01.2024

Jupiter, our Solar System's ruling gas giant, is also the fastest spinning planet, rotating once in less than 10 hours. The gas giant doesn't rotate like a solid body though.

APOD: 2025 March 9 Б Cyclones at Jupiters North Pole
9.03.2025

Why are there so many cyclones around the north pole of Jupiter? The topic is still being researched. NASA's robotic Juno mission orbiting Jupiter took data in 2018 that was used to construct this stunning view of the curious cyclones at Jupiter's north pole.

Saturn by Three
18.09.2003

These three views of Saturn were recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope on March 7th of this year, as the southern hemisphere of the solar system's most gorgeous planet reached its maximum 27 degree tilt toward Earth.

A Roll Cloud Over Uruguay
5.01.2010

What kind of cloud is this? A roll cloud. These rare long clouds may form near advancing cold fronts. In particular, a downdraft from an advancing storm front can cause moist warm air to rise, cool below its dew point, and so form a cloud.

Apollo 12 and Surveyor 3
15.11.2024

Put on your red/blue glasses and gaze across the western Ocean of Storms on the surface of the Moon. The 3D anaglyph features Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad visiting the Surveyor 3 spacecraft in November of 1969.

Leonids Above Torre de la Guaita
26.11.2000

Last year, the 1999 Leonids Meteor Shower came to a tremendous crescendo. Observers in Europe observed a sharp peak in the number of meteors visible around 0210 UTC during the early morning hours of November 18. Meteor counts then exceeded 1000 per hour - the minimum needed to define a true meteor storm.