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Blue Ghost on the Moon
There's a new lander on the Moon. Yesterday Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost executed the first-ever successful commercial lunar landing. During its planned 60-day mission, Blue Ghost will...
The Hubble Ultra Deep Field in Light and Sound
Have you heard about the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field? Either way, you've likely not heard about it like this -- please run your cursor over the featured image and listen! The Hubble Ultra-Deep...
Blue Ghost to the Moon
With spacecraft thrusters at top center, the rugged surface of the Moon lies below the Blue Ghost lander in this space age video frame. The view of the lunar far side was captured by the Firefly...
Athena to the Moon
Planet Earth hangs in the background of this space age selfie. The snapshot was captured by the IM-2 Nova-C lander Athena, just after stage separation following its February 26 launch to the Moon....
Open Star Clusters M35 and NGC 2158
Framed in this single, starry, telescopic field of view are two open star clusters, M35 and NGC 2158. Located within the boundaries of the constellation Gemini, they do appear to be side by side....
Einstein Ring Surrounds Nearby Galaxy Center
Do you see the ring? If you look very closely at the center of the featured galaxy NGC 6505, a ring becomes evident. It is the gravity of NGC 6505, the nearby (z = 0.042) elliptical galaxy that...
M41: The Little Beehive Star Cluster
Why are there so many bright blue stars? Stars are usually born in clusters, and the brightest and most massive of these stars typically glow blue. Less-bright, non-blue stars like our Sun surely...
Light Pillar over Erupting Etna
Can a lava flow extend into the sky? No, but light from the lava flow can. One effect is something quite unusual -- a volcanic light pillar. More typically, light pillars are caused by sunlight and...
Saturn in Infrared from Cassini
Saturn looks slightly different in infrared light. Bands of clouds show great structure, including long stretching storms. Also quite striking in infrared is the unusual hexagonal cloud pattern...
Rima Hyginus
Rima Hyginus is a spectacular fissure, some 220 kilometers long, found near the center of the lunar near side. Easy to spot in telescopic views of the Moon, it stretches top left to bottom right...
Hubble's Andromeda Galaxy Mosaic
The largest photomosaic ever assembled from Hubble Space Telescope image data is a panoramic view of our neighboring spiral Andromeda Galaxy. With 600 overlapping frames assembled from observations...
Messier 87
rmous elliptical galaxy Messier 87 is about 50 million light-years away. Also known as NGC 4486, the giant galaxy holds trillions of stars compared to the mere billions of stars in our large spiral...
HH 30: A Star System with Planets Now Forming
How do stars and planets form? New clues have been found in the protoplanetary system Herbig-Haro 30 by the James Webb Space Telescope in concert with Hubble and the Earth-bound ALMA. The...
Thor's Helmet versus the Seagull
Seen as a seagull and a duck, these nebulae are not the only cosmic clouds to evoke images of flight. But both are winging their way across this broad celestial landscape, spanning almost 7 degrees...
SpaceX Rocket Launch Plume over California
What's happened to the sky? Last Monday, the photogenic launch plume from a SpaceX rocket launch created quite a spectacle over parts of southern California and Arizona. Looking at times like a...
Perijove 11: Passing Jupiter
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,...
Parhelia at Abisko
Three suns seem to hug the horizon in this otherworldly winterscape. But the evocative scene was captured during a February 3rd snowmobile exploration of the mountainous region around Abisko...
A Cosmic Rose: NGC 2237 in Monoceros
The Rosette Nebula, NGC 2237, is not the only cosmic cloud of gas and dust to evoke the imagery of flowers, but it is probably the most famous. At the edge of a large molecular cloud in Monoceros...
Reflections on VdB 31
Riding high in the constellation of Auriga, beautiful, blue VdB 31 is the 31st object in Sidney van den Bergh's 1966 catalog of reflection nebulae. It shares this well-composed celestial still...
Asteroid Bennu Holds the Building Blocks of Life
What can a space rock tell us about life on Earth? NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made a careful approach to the near-Earth asteroid 101955 Bennu in October of 2020 to collect surface samples. ...