APOD: 2025 March 3 Б Blue Ghost on the Moon
3.03.2025

There's a new lander on the Moon. Yesterday Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost executed the first-ever successful commercial lunar landing. During its planned 60-day mission, Blue Ghost will deploy several NASA-commissioned scientific instruments, including PlanetVac which captures lunar dust after creating a small whirlwind of gas.

An Aurora Before the Storm
19.05.2000

Early April brought some of the most intense auroral storms this decade. An aurora on April 6 was reported to be the largest visible on Earth since 1989, and was seen throughout Europe and much of northern North America.

Sakurajima Volcano with Lightning
10.02.2010

Why does a volcanic eruption sometimes create lightning? Pictured above, the Sakurajima volcano in southern Japan was caught erupting early last month. Magma bubbles so hot they glow shoot away as liquid rock bursts through the Earth's surface from below.

The Milky Way Over Paranal
23.01.2007

It's not the sky that's falling. More accurately, the Earth is rising. The Earth's rotation gives a continually changing view to all Earth observers, including those measuring the universe at the Paranal Observatory.

Geminds of the South
16.12.2021

Fireflies flash along a moonlit countryside in this scene taken on the night of December 13/14 from southern Uruguay, planet Earth. On that night meteors fell in the partly cloudy skies above during the annual Geminid meteor shower.

APOD: 2025 September 6 Б Sardinia Sunset
6.09.2025

When the sun sets on September 7, the Full Moon will rise. And on that date denizens around much of our fair planet, including parts of Antarctica, Australia, Asia, Europe, and Africa can witness a total lunar eclipse, with the Moon completely immersed in Earth's shadow.

Green and Black Auroras Over Norway
29.03.2006

What causes gaps between aurora curtains? These unusual gaps can make Research using data from four Cluster spacecraft orbiting the Earth has likely found the secret: auroral gaps, sometimes knows as black auroras, are actually anti-auroras. In normal auroras, electrons and/or predominantly negatively charged particles fall toward Earth along surfaces of constant magnetic field.

Aurora around Saturns North Pole
3.09.2018

Are Saturn's auroras like Earth's? To help answer this question, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Cassini spacecraft monitored Saturn's North Pole simultaneously during Cassini's final orbits around the gas giant in September 2017. During this time, Saturn's tilt caused its North Pole to be clearly visible from Earth.

January Aurora Over Norway
24.01.2012

What's that in the sky? An aurora. A large coronal mass ejection occurred on our Sun five days ago, throwing a cloud of fast moving electrons, protons, and ions toward the Earth. Although...

Through the Shadow of the Moon
14.04.2015

What would it look like to fly through a total eclipse of the Sun? On a typical place on Earth in the path of the dark shadow of the Moon during a total eclipse, an observer would see the Moon cross the face of the Sun, completely blocking it for a few minutes.