A Heart Shaped Lenticular Cloud
14.02.2016

Can a cloud love a mountain? Perhaps not, but on a Valentine's Day like today, one might be prone to seeing heart-shaped symbols where they don't actually exist. A fleeting pareidolia, the featured heart was really a lenticular cloud that appeared one morning last July above Mount Cook National Park in New Zealand.

Supernumerary Rainbows over New Jersey
2.10.2018

Yes, but can your rainbow do this? After the remnants of Hurricane Florence passed over Jersey Shore, New Jersey, USA last month, the Sun came out in one direction but something quite unusual appeared in the opposite direction: a hall of rainbows.

A Plutonian Landscape
15.01.2021

This shadowy landscape of majestic mountains and icy plains stretches toward the horizon on a small, distant world. It was captured from a range of about 18,000 kilometers when New Horizons looked back toward Pluto, 15 minutes after the spacecraft's closest approach on July 14.

A Martian Metamorphosis
4.06.2002

Is it an Escher, or Mars? Three different types of surfaces visible in the North Polar Cap of Mars morph into each other in a way perhaps reminiscent of the works of M. C. Escher. On the far left dark sand covers the ground, while the center shows a transition to a dune field.

Frizion Illume
29.05.2003

Scientific images of cosmic dust clouds or even frozen water can be esthetic too. In fact, this picture of thin layers of forming ice crystals uses a scientific understanding of light's wave properties solely for artistic purposes. Titled "Illume", the picture was created by astrophysicist Peter Wasilewski.

1006 AD: Supernova in the Sky
30.04.2006

A new star, likely the brightest supernova in recorded human history, appeared in planet Earth's sky about 1,000 years ago today, in 1006 AD. The expanding debris cloud from the stellar explosion is still visible to modern astronomers, but what did the supernova look like in 1006?

Sundogs over the VLA
23.08.1999

What if you woke up one morning and saw more than one Sun in the sky? Most probably, you would be seeing sundogs, extra-images of the Sun created by falling ice-crystals in the Earth's atmosphere. As water freezes in the atmosphere, small, flat, six-sided, ice crystals might be formed.

Discovery in Twilight
10.03.2011

As evening twilight faded on March 7, sky gazers around planet Earth enjoyed a beautiful pairing of young crescent Moon and brilliant planet Jupiter. Along with stars setting in the west, the two bright...

The Mysterious Methane of Mars
21.12.2014

What's creating methane on Mars? Recent measurements from the robotic Curiosity rover currently rolling across Mars indicate a surprising 10-fold increase in atmospheric methane between measurements only months apart. Life is a major...

Meteor in the Milky Way
23.04.2015

Earth's April showers include the Lyrid Meteor Shower, observed for more than 2,000 years when the planet makes its annual passage through the dust stream of long-period Comet Thatcher. A grain...