Great Observatories Explore Galactic Center
11.11.2009

Where can a telescope take you? Four hundred years ago, a telescope took Galileo to the Moon to discover craters, to Saturn to discover rings, to Jupiter to discover moons, to Venus to discover phases, and to the Sun to discover spots.

STARFORGE: A Star Formation Simulation
23.06.2021

How do stars form? Most form in giant molecular clouds located in the central disk of a galaxy. The process is started, influenced, and limited by the stellar winds, jets, high energy starlight, and supernova explosions of previously existing stars.

Zeta Oph: Runaway Star
4.02.2011

Like a ship plowing through cosmic seas, runaway star Zeta Ophiuchi produces the arcing interstellar bow wave or bow shock seen in this stunning infrared portrait from the WISE spacecraft. In the false-color view...

A Halo for NGC 6164
22.05.2014

Beautiful emission nebula NGC 6164 was created by a rare, hot, luminous O-type star, some 40 times as massive as the Sun. Seen at the center of the cosmic cloud, the star is a mere 3 to 4 million years old.

NGC 6888: X Rays in the Wind
16.10.2003

NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a cosmic bubble of interstellar gas about 25 light-years across. Created by winds from the bright, massive star seen near the center of this composite image, the shocked filaments of gas glowing at optical wavelengths are represented in green and yellowish hues.

A Redshift Lookup Table for our Universe
8.04.2013

How far away is "redshift six"? Although humans are inherently familiar with distance and time, what is actually measured for astronomical objects is redshift, a color displacement that depends on exactly how energy density has evolved in our universe.

APOD: 2020 August 26 Б Cygnus Skyscape
26.08.2020

In brush strokes of interstellar dust and glowing hydrogen gas, this beautiful skyscape is painted across the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy near the northern end of the Great Rift and the constellation Cygnus the Swan.

APOD: 2025 June 4 Б A Milky Road to the Rubin Observatory
4.06.2025

Is the sky the same every night? No -- the night sky changes every night in many ways. To better explore how the night sky changes, the USA's NSF and DOE commissioned the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Cerro PachцЁn, Chile.

HESS Telescopes Explore the High Energy Sky
8.01.2019

They may look like modern mechanical dinosaurs but they are enormous swiveling eyes that watch the sky. The High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) Observatory is composed of four 12-meter reflecting-mirror telescopes surrounding a larger telescope housing a 28-meter mirror.

The Fainting of Betelgeuse
2.01.2020

Begirt with many a blazing star, Orion the Hunter is one of the most recognizable constellations. In this night skyscape the Hunter's stars rise in the northern hemisphere's winter sky on December 30, 2019, tangled in bare trees near Newnan, Georgia, USA.