Saturn seen by Cassini spacecraftSaturn sits nested in its rings of ice as Cassini once again plunges toward the graceful giant.This natural color mosaic was acquired by the Cassini spacecraft as it soared 39 degrees above the unilluminated side of the rings.Little light makes its way through the rings to be scattered in Cassini's …
Star-Forming Region NGC 2467A colourful star-forming region is featured in this stunning NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 2467. Looking like a roiling cauldron of some exotic cosmic brew, huge clouds of gas and dust are sprinkled with bright blue, hot young stars.Strangely shaped dust clouds, resembling spilled liq…
Aurora over Høgtuva MountainThe aurora borealis over Høgtuva Mountain in Norway. The Earth's magnetic field funnels particles from the solar wind over the polar regions. More than 80 kilometres above the ground, these collide with molecules in the atmosphere causing them to glow: green and pale red for oxygen and crimson for n…
The NGC 7814 GalaxyGalaxies can take many shapes and be oriented any way relative to us in the sky. This can make it hard to figure out their actual morphology, as a galaxy can look very different from different viewpoints. A special case is when we are lucky enough to observe a spiral galaxy directly from its edge, p…
Open Star Cluster NGC 290Hubble has captured the most detailed image to date of the open star cluster NGC 290 in the Small Magellanic Cloud.The image taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope show a myriad of stars in crystal clear detail. The brilliant open star cluster, NGC 290…
Alpha Centauri A & Alpha Centauri BThe closest star system to the Earth is the famous Alpha Centauri group. Located in the constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur), at a distance of 4.3 light-years, this system is made up of the binary formed by the stars Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, plus the faint red dwarf Alpha Centauri …
Star-Forming Region NGC 281This wide-field view of the star-forming region NGC 281 in the constellation Cassiopeia was taken with the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, USAImage Credit: T.A. Rector/University of Alaska Anchorage and WIYN/AURA/NSF…
Supernova Remnant IC 443This oddly colorful nebula is the supernova remnant IC 443 as seen by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Also known as the Jellyfish nebula, IC 443 is particularly interesting because it provides a look into how stellar explosions interact with their environment. IC 443 can be foun…
Omega CentauriOmega Centauri has been known as an unusual globular cluster for a long time. A new result obtained by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Observatory reveals that the explanation behind Omega Centauri's peculiarities may be a black hole hidden in its centre. One implication of the di…
Messier 87: Giant Galaxy is Still GrowingObservations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope have revealed that the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 has swallowed an entire medium-sized galaxy over the last billion years. For the first time a team of astronomers has been able to track the motions of 300 glowing planetary nebulae to find clear e…
VenusVenus is the second planet from the Sun, orbiting it every 224.7 Earth days. It has the longest rotation period (243 days) of any planet in the Solar System and rotates in the opposite direction to most other planets. It has no natural satellite. It is named after the Roman goddess of love and beaut…
U CamelopardalisA bright star is surrounded by a tenuous shell of gas in this unusual image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. U Camelopardalis, or U Cam for short, is a star nearing the end of its life. As it begins to run low on fuel, it is becoming unstable. Every few thousand years, it coughs out a nearl…
Jupiter seen by Cassini spacecraftThis true color mosaic of Jupiter was constructed from images taken by the narrow angle camera onboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft on December 29, 2000, during its closest approach to the giant planet at a distance of approximately 10 million kilometers (6.2 million miles).It is the most detailed glob…
Globular Cluster NGC 6397Image of globular cluster NGC 6397 in the constellation Ara (the Altar). The cluster is home to a highly unusual system consisting of a fast spinning pulsar and a bloated red companion star.Image Credit: NASA, ESA and H. Richer (University of British Columbia)…
Spiral Galaxy Messier 94This image shows the galaxy Messier 94, which lies in the small northern constellation of the Hunting Dogs, about 16 million light-years away.Within the bright ring around Messier 94 new stars are forming at a high rate and many young, bright stars are present within it – thanks to this, this featur…
Star-Forming Region LHA 120-N44This colourful view shows the star-forming region LHA 120-N44 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. This picture combines the view in visible light from the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile with images in infrared light and X-rays…
Star Cluster Pismis 24Home to some of the largest stars ever discovered, the open stellar cluster Pismis 24 blazes from the core of NGC 6357, a nebula in the constellation of Scorpius (the Scorpion). Several stars in the clusters weigh in at over 100 times the mass of the Sun, making them real monster stars. The strange …
Milky Way, Alpha Centauri AB and Proxima Centauri seen over La Silla ObservatoryOur magnificent Milky Way galaxy is radiant over La Silla Observatory. The ESO 3.6-metre telescope is shown to the right, now home to the world's foremost extrasolar planet hunter: High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), a spectrograph with unrivalled precision.Image Credit: ESO/B. Ta…
