The Compton Observatory Turns Five
13.04.1996

Earlier this April, NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, completed its fifth successful year in orbit, exploring the gamma ray sky. Pictured is astronaut Jay Apt perched in the shuttle payload bay below the massive observatory. Compton is the largest civilian instrument ever flown - the whole observatory is roughly the size of a school bus.

Crab Nebula Mosaic from HST
2.12.2005

The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier's famous list of things which are not comets. In fact, the cosmic Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, an expanding cloud of debris from the death explosion of a massive star.

X Ray Stars of 47 Tuc
21.07.2005

Visible light images show the central region of globular cluster 47 Tucanae is closely packed, with stars less than a tenth of a light-year apart. This Chandra false-color x-ray view of central...

The COMPTEL Gamma-Ray Sky
29.05.1996

This premier gamma-ray view of the sky was produced by the COMPTEL instrument onboard NASA's orbiting Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. The entire sky is seen projected on a coordinate system centered on our Milky Way Galaxy with the plane of the Galaxy running across the middle of the picture.

APOD: 2024 July 23 Б The Crab Nebula from Visible to X Ray
23.07.2024

What powers the Crab Nebula? A city-sized magnetized neutron star spinning around 30 times a second. Known as the Crab Pulsar, it is the bright spot in the center of the gaseous swirl at the nebula's core.

A Hotspot Map of Neutron Star J0030s Surface
18.12.2019

What do neutron stars look like? Previously these city-sized stars were too small and too far away to resolve. Recently, however, the first maps of the locations and sizes of hotspots on a neutron...

Fermi Catalogs the Gamma ray Sky
18.03.2010

What shines in the gamma-ray sky? The most complete answer yet to that question is offered by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope's first all-sky catalog. Fermi's sources of cosmic gamma-rays feature nature...

GLAST Gamma Ray Sky Simulation
12.11.1998

This simulated image models the intensities of gamma rays with over 40 million times the energy of visible light, and represents how the sky might appear to the proposed Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) after its first year in orbit.

The 76 Meter Lovell Radio Telescope
8.03.1996

Jodrell Bank in England is the home of the Lovell Telescope one of the largest radio telescopes in the world. Completed in 1957 under the direction of Bernard Lovell, the 250 ft. diameter dish was the largest steerable radio telescope.

Arecibo: The Largest Telescope
29.11.1998

The Arecibo radio telescope is currently the largest single-dish telescope in the world. First opening in 1963, this 305 meter (1000 foot) radio telescope resides in a natural valley of Puerto Rico. The Arecibo telescope has been used for many astronomical research projects, including