Comet PanSTARRS and a Crescent Moon
20.07.2015

A comet has brightened quickly and unexpectedly. Discovered last year, Comet C/2014 Q1 (PanSTARRS) is expected to be visible now for a few days to the unaided eye, just after sunset, from some locations. The comet rounded the Sun on July 6 and apparently has shed quite a bit of gas and dust.

APOD: 2024 September 25 Б Comet A3 Through an Australian Sunrise
25.09.2024

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is now visible in the early morning sky. Diving into the inner Solar System at an odd angle, this large dirty iceberg will pass its closest to the Sun -- between the orbits of Mercury and Venus -- in just two days.

New Horizons at Jupiter
4.12.2003

Headed for the first close-up exploration of the Pluto-Charon system and the icy denizens of the Kuiper belt, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is pictured here in an artist's vision of the robot probe outward bound.

Panoramic Eclipse Composite with Star Trails
30.08.2017

What was happening in the sky during last week's total solar eclipse? This featured little-planet, all-sky, double time-lapse, digitally-fused composite captured celestial action during both night and day from a single location.

Parker vs Perseid
16.08.2018

The brief flash of a bright Perseid meteor streaks across the upper right in this composited series of exposures made early Sunday morning near the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower.

Comet Ikeya Zhang
21.02.2002

Comet Ikeya-Zhang is presently heading north in planet Earth's sky, framed by stars of the constellation Cetus. The comet was discovered as a faint, telescopic object near the western horizon on the evening...

Titan s X Ray
29.04.2004

This June's rare and much heralded transit of Venus will feature our currently brilliant evening star in silhouette, as the inner planet glides across the face of the Sun. But on January 5, 2003 and even rarer transit took place.

The Iron Tail of Comet McNaught
4.05.2007

Outstanding in planet Earth's sky early this year, Comet McNaught is captured in this view from the STEREO A spacecraft. McNaught's coma is so bright, it blooms into the long horizontal stripe at the bottom of the field.

An Unusual Mountain on Asteroid Ceres
30.06.2015

What created this large mountain on asteroid Ceres? No one is yet sure. As if in anticipation of today being Asteroid Day on Earth, the robotic spacecraft Dawn in orbit around Ceres took the best yet image of an unusually tall mountain on the Asteroid Belt's largest asteroid.

Pleiades, Planets, And Hot Plasma
24.05.2000

Bright stars of the Pleiades, four planets, and erupting solar plasma are all captured in this spectacular image from the space-based SOlar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). In the foreground of the 15 degree wide field of view, a bubble of hot plasma, called a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME)