Swift Launches
22.11.2004

Where do gamma ray bursts occur? To help find out, NASA launched the Swift satellite on Saturday, as pictured above. What Swift is designed to do better than any previous satellite is to quickly locate these enigmatic explosions in both sky position and distance.

Three Arches Above Utah
24.05.2011

How many arches can you count in the above image? If you count both spans of the Double Arch in the Arches National Park in Utah, USA, then two. But since the above image...

Ring Scan
24.10.2007

Scroll right and cruise above the thin, icy rings of Saturn. This high resolution scan is a mosaic of images presented in natural color and recorded in May, over about 2.5 hours as the Cassini spacecraft passed above the unlit side of the rings.

APOD: 2023 July 2 Б Milky Way and Aurora over Antarctica
2.07.2023

It was one of the better skies of this long night. In parts of Antarctica, not only is it winter, but the Sun can spend weeks below the horizon. At China's Zhongshan Station, people sometimes venture out into the cold to photograph a spectacular night sky.

M55: Globular Star Cluster
22.09.2000

The fifty-fifth entry in Charles Messier's catalog, M55 is a large and lovely globular cluster of around 100,000 stars. Only 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius, M55 appears to earth-bound observers to be nearly 2/3 the size of the full moon.

The City Comet
26.03.1997

Undaunted by the artificial glow from one of the most famous urban skylines on Earth, comet Hale-Bopp shines above the city of New York, USA. Photographed on March 23rd, this view from New Jersey...

Reflections on vdB 9
21.02.2019

Centered in a well-composed celestial still life, pretty, blue vdB 9 is the 9th object in Sidney van den Bergh's 1966 catalog of reflection nebulae. It shares this telescopic field of view, about...

Alpha Centauri: The Closest Star System
23.03.2003

The closest star system to the Sun is the Alpha Centauri system. Of the three stars in the system, the dimmest -- called Proxima Centauri -- is actually the nearest star. The bright stars Alpha Centauri...

December s Comet Wirtanen
7.12.2018

Coming close in mid-December, Comet 46P Wirtanen hangs in this starry sky over the bell tower of a Romanesque church. In the constructed vertical panorama, a series of digital exposures capture its greenish coma on December 3 from Sant Llorenc de la Muga, Girona, Catalonia, Spain, planet Earth.

NGC 4676: When Mice Collide
12.06.2004

These two mighty galaxies are pulling each other apart. Known as "The Mice" because they have such long tails, each spiral galaxy has likely already passed through the other. They will probably collide again and again until they coalesce.