APOD: 2023 July 4 Б Aurora over Icelandic Waterfall
4.07.2023

It seemed like the sky exploded. The original idea was to photograph an aurora over a waterfall. After waiting for hours under opaque clouds, though, hope was running out. Others left. Then, unexpectedly, the clouds moved away.

Orion Nebula: The 2MASS View
20.04.2002

Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula's glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1,500 light-years away.

Milky Way Auroral Flower
18.10.2022

Could the stem of our Milky Way bloom into an auroral flower? No, not really, even though it may appear that way in todayБs featured all-sky image. On the left, the central plane of our home galaxy extends from the horizon past the middle of the sky.

X-Raying the Moon
31.08.1995

Above is a picture of the Moon taken in X-rays by the Roentgen Observatory Satellite ROSAT in 1990. This famous picture shows three distinct regions: a bright X-ray sky, a bright part of the Moon, and a relatively dark part of the Moon.

Moon and Venus over Corona Del Mar Beach
8.03.2004

The crescent Moon passed nearly in front of Venus last week. The close conjunction of the night sky's two brightest objects created a striking pose for many viewing the evening sky just after sunset. Such a pose, shown above, was captured between clouds over Corona Del Mar Beach in California, USA.

Classic Orion Nebulae
26.08.2009

The Great Nebula in Orion, also known as M42, is one of the most famous nebulae in the sky. The star forming region's glowing gas clouds and hot young stars are near...

A Partial Solar Eclipse over Texas
22.05.2012

It was a typical Texas sunset except that most of the Sun was missing. The location of the missing piece of the Sun was not a mystery -- it was behind the Moon. Sunday night's partial eclipse of the Sun by the Moon turned into one of the best photographed astronomical events in history.

COBE Hotspots: The Oldest Structures Known
7.02.1998

Above is a microwave image of the entire sky. The plane of our galaxy runs horizontally through the center. This historic all-sky map is based on the first two years of data from NASA's COsmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite.

Stars Without Galaxies
27.03.1999

Galaxies are made up of stars, but are all stars found within galaxies? Using the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers exploring the Virgo Cluster of galaxies have now found about 600 red giant stars adrift in intergalactic space. Above is an artist's vision of the sky from a hypothetical planet of such a lonely sun.

M45: The Pleiades Star Cluster
18.09.2013

Have you ever seen the Pleiades star cluster? Even if you have, you probably have never seen it as dusty as this. Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the bright stars of the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city.