Supernova Remnant E0102 72
5.09.2009

The expanding debris cloud from the explosion of a massive star is captured in this multiwavelength composite, combining x-ray and optical images from the Chandra and Hubble telescopes. Identified as E0102-72, the supernova remnant lies about 190,000 light-years away in our neighboring galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud.

Aurora over New Zealand
26.02.2014

Sometimes the more you look at an image, the more you see. Such may be the case for this beautiful nighttime panorama taken last week in New Zealand. Visible right off, on the far left, are common clouds, slightly altered by the digital fusion of combining 11 separate 20-second exposures.

Perijove 11: Passing Jupiter
8.09.2019

Here comes Jupiter! NASA's robotic spacecraft Juno is continuing on its 53-day, highly-elongated orbits around our Solar System's largest planet. The featured video is from perijove 11 in early 2018, the eleventh time Juno has passed near Jupiter since it arrived in mid-2016.

APOD: 2025 February 16 Б Perijove 11: Passing Jupiter
16.02.2025

Here comes Jupiter. NASA's robotic spacecraft Juno is continuing on its highly elongated orbits around our Solar System's largest planet. The featured video is from perijove 11 in early 2018, the eleventh time Juno passed near Jupiter since it arrived in mid-2016.

Counting Stars in the Infrared Sky
19.07.2002

The bulging center of our Milky Way Galaxy, dark cosmic clouds, the thin galactic plane, and even nearby galaxies are easy to spot in this sky view. But each pixel in the digital image is actually based on star counts alone -- as derived from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) database.

Galaxy Wars: M81 versus M82
15.04.2006

In this stunning cosmic vista, galaxy M81 is on the left surrounded by blue spiral arms. On the right marked by massive gas and dust clouds, is M82. These two mammoth galaxies have been locked in gravitational combat for the past billion years.

A Lunar Corona over Turin
16.09.2019

What are those colorful rings around the Moon? A corona. Rings like this will sometimes appear when the Moon is seen through thin clouds. The effect is created by the quantum mechanical diffraction of light around individual, similarly-sized water droplets in an intervening but mostly-transparent cloud.

Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka
20.11.2025

Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka are the bright bluish stars from east to west (upper right to lower left) along the diagonal in this cosmic vista. Otherwise known as the Belt of Orion, these three blue supergiant stars are hotter and much more massive than the Sun.

Jupiter: The Great Yellow Spot
11.03.1997

What happened to Jupiter's Great Red Spot? Operating at a chilly 55 degrees Kelvin, the Galileo Spacecraft's Near Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (NIMS) recorded this composite image of Jupiter's Great Red Spot in late June 1996.

Galactic Supernova Remnant IC 443
3.09.2003

About 8000 years ago, a star in our Galaxy exploded. Ancient humans might have noticed the supernova as a temporary star, but modern humans can see the expanding shell of gas even today. Pictured...