NGC 3717: A Nearly Sideways Spiral Galaxy
12.11.2019

Some spiral galaxies are seen nearly sideways. Most bright stars in spiral galaxies swirl around the center in a disk, and seen from the side, this disk can be appear quite thin. Some spiral galaxies appear even thinner than NGC 3717, which is actually seen tilted just a bit.

Sky Full of SARs
17.08.2024

On August 11 a Rocket Lab Electron rocket launched from a rotating planet. With a small satellite on board its mission was dubbed A Sky Full of SARs (Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites), departing for low Earth orbit from Mahia Peninsula on New Zealand's north island.

APOD: 2025 November 12 Б A Super Lunar Corona
12.11.2025

What are those colorful rings around the Moon? A corona. Rings like this will sometimes appear when the Moon is seen through thin clouds. The effect is created by the diffraction of light around individual, similarly-sized water droplets in an intervening but mostly transparent cloud.

HR 4796A: Not Saturn
5.02.1999

These are not false-color renderings of the latest observations of Saturn's magnificent rings. Instead, the panels show a strikingly similar system on a much larger scale - a ring around the young, Vega-like star, HR 4796A, located about 200 light-years from Earth.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar 1910-1995
1.09.1995

On August 21, 1995 one of the greatest astrophysicists of modern times passed away. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar was a creative, prolific genius whose ability to combine mathematical precision with physical insight changed humanity's view of stellar physics.

Edge-On Spiral Galaxy NGC 891
28.02.1997

Is our Galaxy this thin? We believe so. The Milky Way, like NGC 891 pictured above, has the width of a typical spiral galaxy. Spirals have most of their bright stars, gas, and obscuring dust in a thin disk.

The Large Cloud of Magellan
2.09.2004

Portuguese navigator Fernando de Magellan and his crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during the first circumnavigation of planet Earth. As a result, two fuzzy cloud-like objects easily visible for southern hemisphere skygazers are known as the Clouds of Magellan.

The Crab Nebula from VLT
22.11.1999

The Crab Nebula, filled with mysterious filaments, is the result of a star that was seen to explode in 1054 AD. This spectacular supernova explosion was recorded by Chinese and (quite probably) Anasazi Indian astronomers.

Bright Galaxy NGC 2903
6.07.2007

Spiral galaxy NGC 2903 is only some 20 million light-years distant in the constellation Leo. One of the brighter galaxies visible from the northern hemisphere, it is surprisingly missing from Charles Messier's famous catalog of celestial sights. This impressively sharp color image shows off the galaxy's beautiful blue spiral arms.

Art and Science in NGC 981
12.11.2009

This beautiful telescopic skyscape features spiral galaxy NGC 981. The island universe is about 50,000 light-years across and lies some 60 million light-years away toward the constellation Aries. An artistic presentation, the image...