NGC 7814: The Little Sombrero in Pegasus
30.06.2017

Point your telescope toward the high flying constellation Pegasus and you can find this expanse of Milky Way stars and distant galaxies. Dominated by NGC 7814, the pretty field of view would almost be covered by a full moon.

Hurricane Season Animated
27.11.2017

Where do hurricanes go? To better understand dangerous storms, NASA compiled data from several satellites into a supercomputer simulation of this past year's hurricane season. Specifically, the featured video shows how smoke (white), sea salt (blue), and dust (brown) tracked from 2017 August through October across the northern half of Earth's Western Hemisphere.

NGC 4651: The Umbrella Galaxy
7.02.2022

It's raining stars. What appears to be a giant cosmic umbrella is now known to be a tidal stream of stars stripped from a small satellite galaxy. The main galaxy, spiral galaxy...

APOD: 2023 August 8 Б Moon Meets Jupiter
8.08.2023

What's that below the Moon? Jupiter -- and its largest moons. Many skygazers across planet Earth enjoyed the close conjunction of Earth's Moon passing nearly in front of Jupiter in mid-June. The featured image is a single exposure of the event taken from MorцЁn de la Frontera, Spain.

APOD: 2024 June 9 Б How to Identify that Light in the Sky
9.06.2024

What is that light in the sky? The answer to one of humanity's more common questions may emerge from a few quick observations. For example -- is it moving or blinking?

Heating Coronal Loops
28.09.2000

Extending above the photosphere or visible surface of the Sun, the faint, tenuous solar corona can't be easily seen from Earth, but it is measured to be hundreds of times hotter than the photosphere itself. What makes the solar corona so hot?

COBE Hotspots: The Oldest Structures Known
6.02.1996

Above are two microwave images of the sky, looking north and south of our galaxy's equator, based on data from NASA's COBE satellite. After computer processing to remove contributions from nearby objects and the effects of the earth's motion, they show "spots".

NanoSail D
28.01.2011

Featured in this artist's illustration, NASA's NanoSail-D finally unfurled a very thin, 10 square meter reflective sail on January 20th, becoming the first solar sail spacecraft in low Earth orbit. Often considered...

The Coldest Place on Earth
11.12.2013

How cold can it get on Earth? In the interior of the Antarctica, a record low temperature of -93.2 C (-135.8 F) has been recorded. This is about 25 C (45 F) colder than the coldest lows noted for any place humans live permanently.

M33: Spiral Galaxy in Triangulum
14.09.2006

The small, northern constellation Triangulum harbors this magnificent face-on spiral galaxy, M33. Its popular names include the Pinwheel Galaxy or just the Triangulum Galaxy. M33 is over 50,000 light-years in diameter, third largest in the Local Group of galaxies after the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), and our own Milky Way.