A 2017 U1: An Interstellar Visitor
3.11.2017

Traveling at high velocity along an extreme hyperbolic orbit and making a hairpin turn as it swung past the Sun, the now designated A/2017 U1 is the first known small body from interstellar space.

APOD: 2023 April 2 Б M57: The Ring Nebula from Hubble
2.04.2023

It was noticed hundreds of years ago by stargazers who could not understand its unusual shape. It looked like a ring on the sky. Except for the rings of Saturn, the Ring Nebula (M57) may be the most famous celestial circle.

Mir Dreams
27.03.2004

This dream-like image of Mir was recorded by astronauts as the Space Shuttle Atlantis approached the Russian space station prior to docking during the STS-76 mission. Sporting spindly appendages and solar panels...

Layered Mars: An Ancient Water World
5.12.2000

Pictured above, layers upon layers stretch across the floor of West Candor Chasma within the immense martian Valles Marineris. Covering an area 1.5 by 2.9 kilometers, the full image from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft shows over 100 individual beds.

Spitzer s M101
30.12.2009

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy M101 is one of the last entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog, but definitely not one of the least. About 170,000 light-years across, this galaxy is enormous, almost twice the size of our own Milky Way Galaxy.

Lewins Challenge: 360 Degree Star Trails
17.07.2011

You could be the first person ever to take a real single-exposure image like this. The above image from Vienna, Austria is not real in the sense that the 360 degree star trails in the sky appear only because of a digital trick.

Tutulemma: Solar Eclipse Analemma
22.08.2016

If you went outside at exactly the same time every day and took a picture that included the Sun, how would the Sun's position change? With great planning and effort, such a series of images can be taken. The figure-8 path the Sun follows over the course of a year is called an analemma.

Sunspots and Solar Active Regions
1.08.2002

July was a good month for sunspots ... really big sunspots. In fact, the full disk and inset pictures above show three large groups of spots, photographed only a few days ago on July 28. Together the sunspots span a region about thirty times the diameter of planet Earth.

Small Star
5.06.1997

A dim double star system cataloged as Gliese 623 lies 25 light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Hercules. The individual stars of this binary system were distinguished for the first time when the Hubble Space Telescope's Faint Object Camera recorded this image in June 1994.

La Superba
18.12.2008

Y Canum Venaticorum (Y CVn) is a very rare star in planet Earth's night sky. It's also very red, exhibiting such a remarkable spectrum of light, 19th century astronomer Angelo Secchi dubbed it La Superba.