Dark Dunes on Mars
20.07.2016

How does wind affect sand on Mars? To help find out if it differs significantly from Earth, the robotic Curiosity rover on Mars was directed to investigate the dark Namib Dune in the Bagnold Dune Field in Gale Crater. Namib is the first active sand dune investigated up close outside of planet Earth.

The Moon During a Total Lunar Eclipse
25.05.2021

How does the Moon's appearance change during a total lunar eclipse? The featured time-lapse video was digitally processed to keep the Moon bright and centered during the 5-hour eclipse of 2018 January 31. At first the full moon is visible because only a full moon can undergo a lunar eclipse.

APOD: 2023 September 25 Б Arp 142: The Hummingbird Galaxy
25.09.2023

What's happening to this spiral galaxy? Just a few hundred million years ago, NGC 2936, the upper of the two large galaxies shown at the bottom, was likely a normal spiral galaxy -- spinning, creating stars -- and minding its own business.

Abell 1795: A Galaxy Cluster s Cooling Flow
8.12.2000

Throughout the Universe, galaxies tend to swarm in groups ranging from just a handful of members to casts of thousands. Astronomers have realized since the early 1970s that the larger swarms, immense clusters of galaxies millions of light-years across, are immersed within tenuous clouds of hot gas which glow strongly in x-rays.

The High Energy Heart Of The Milky Way
29.07.1998

These high resolution false color pictures of the Galactic center region in high energy X-ray and gamma-ray light result from a very long exposure of roughly 3,000 hours performed from 1990 to 1997 by the French SIGMA telescope onboard the Russian GRANAT spacecraft.

STS 1: First Shuttle Launch
12.04.2001

On April 12, 1981, twenty years ago today, the Space Shuttle Columbia became the first shuttle to orbit the Earth. In this gorgeous time exposure, flood lights play on the Columbia and service structures (left) as it rests atop Complex 39's Pad A at Kennedy Space Center in preparation for first launch.

Stickney Crater
7.11.2009

Stickney Crater, the largest crater on the martian moon Phobos, is named for Chloe Angeline Stickney Hall, mathematician and wife of astronomer Asaph Hall. Asaph Hall discovered both the Red Planet's moons in 1877.

HD 82943: Planet Swallower
18.05.2001

Stars like HD 82943 are main sequence G dwarf stars with temperatures and compositions similar to the Sun. Also like the Sun, HD 82943 is known to have at least two giant planets, but unlike gas giants in our solar system their orbits are not nearly circular and bring them closer to the parent star.

Phi Persei: Double Star
2.10.1999

It's clear who is the biggest star in this binary system. Based on recent results, this artist's vision of the double star Phi Persei, 720 light years away, shows a bright, rapidly rotating massive star surrounded by a disk of gas. A small companion star orbits 100 million miles away.

Temperatures on Exoplanet WASP 43b
3.05.2024

A mere 280 light-years from Earth, tidally locked, Jupiter-sized exoplanet WASP-43b orbits its parent star once every 0.8 Earth days. That puts it about 2 million kilometers (less than 1/25th the orbital distance of Mercury) from a small, cool sun.