Perseid Storm
21.08.2010

Storms on the distant horizon and comet dust raining through the heavens above are combined in this alluring nightscape. The scene was recorded in the early hours of August 13 from the Keota Star Party site on the Pawnee National Grasslands of northeastern Colorado, USA.

Stereo Vesta
20.08.2011

Get out your red/blue glasses and float next to 4 Vesta. A 500 kilometer diameter world, Vesta lies in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. This stereo anaglyph...

Icelandic Legends and Aurora
8.12.2015

Legends collide in this dramatic vista of land, sea, and sky. The land is Iceland, specifically VМk М MЩrdal, a southern village known for its beautiful black sand beaches. The sea, the Atlantic Ocean...

Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse
22.01.1996

Betelgeuse (sounds a lot like "beetle juice"), a red supergiant star about 600 lightyears distant, is shown here in this Hubble Space Telescope image which represents the first direct picture of the surface of a star other than the Sun.

Comet PanSTARRS, Moon, and Venus
23.07.2015

It is the object to the left of the big tree that's generating much recent excitement. If you look closely, there you can see Comet PanSTARRS, complete with two tails. During July, this comet has increased markedly in brightness and has just passed its closest approach to Earth.

The First Explorer
31.01.2018

Sixty years ago, on January 31, 1958, the First Explorer was successfully launched by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency on a Jupiter-C rocket. Inaugurating the era of space exploration for the United States, Explorer...

Planetary Alignment over Italy
19.12.2021

It is not a coincidence that planets line up. That's because all of the planets orbit the Sun in (nearly) a single sheet called the plane of the ecliptic. When viewed from inside that plane -- as Earth dwellers are likely to do -- the planets all appear confined to a single band.

Southwest Mercury
13.02.2000

The planet Mercury resembles a moon. Mercury's old surface is heavily cratered like many moons. Mercury is larger than most moons but smaller than Jupiter's moon Ganymede and Saturn's moon Titan. Mercury is much denser and more massive than any moon, though, because it is made mostly of iron.

A Zodiacal Sky over Horseshoe Bend
22.05.2017

What's causing the unusual ray of white light extending upward from the central horizon? Dust orbiting the Sun. At certain times of the year, a band of sun-reflecting dust from the inner Solar System rises prominently before sunrise and is called zodiacal light.

Planets of the Solar System: Tilts and Spins
20.05.2019

How does your favorite planet spin? Does it spin rapidly around a nearly vertical axis, or horizontally, or backwards? The featured video animates NASA images of all eight planets in our Solar System to show them spinning side-by-side for an easy comparison.