Astronomy, Eclipses. Telescopes and more. Look to the sky!
From the category archives:
What’s happening on the surface of Saturn’s moon Helene?
The moon was imaged in
unprecedented detail last week as the
robotic
Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn
swooped to within
two Earth diameters of the diminutive moon.
Although conventional craters and hills appear, the above raw and unprocessed image also
shows terrain that appears unusually smooth and
streaked.
Planetary astronomers will be inspecting [...]
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The two galaxies on the far left were unknown until 1968.
Although they would have appeared as two of the brighter galaxies on the night sky, the opaque dust of the
central band of our
Milky Way Galaxy had
obscured them from being seen in visible light.
The above image in
infrared light taken by [...]
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What’s that bright object in the sky?
A common question with
answers that vary by time and season, the quick answer
just after sunset in middle of last month, from the norther hemisphere, was Mars.
The above picturesque panorama, taken during a ski trip from the
Alps in
Switzerland,
shows not only
Mars, but much more.
Pine trees [...]
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Is it art?
If so, the paintbrush was the
Spirit robotic rover,
the canvas was the
soil on Mars,
and the artists were the
scientists and engineers
of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission.
This panoramic picture, created in 2004 and shown above compressed horizontally, was mostly unintentional — the
MERS
team was primarily instructing Spirit to investigate [...]
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Reddened
light from the setting Sun illuminates the cloud banks
hugging this snowy, rugged terrain.
Inspiring a moment of quiet contemplation,
the sunset scene
included a remarkable pillar of light that seemed to
connect the clouds in the sky with the mountains below.
Known as a
Sun pillar,
the luminous column was produced by
sunlight reflecting from flat,
six-sided ice crystals formed [...]
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Magnificent spiral galaxy
NGC 4565
is viewed edge-on from planet Earth.
Also known as the Needle Galaxy
for its narrow profile, bright NGC 4565 is a stop
on many telescopic tours of the northern sky,
in the faint but well-groomed
constellation Coma
Berenices.
This
sharp, colorful image reveals the galaxy’s bulging central core
cut by obscuring dust lanes that lace
NGC 4565’s thin [...]
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The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest human-made object
ever to orbit the Earth.
The ISS is so large that it can be seen drifting overhead with the unaided eye, and is
frequently
imaged
from
the
ground
in
picturesque
fashion.
Last month, the station was
visited again by
space shuttle,
which resupplied the station and added a
new module.
The ISS is currently operated by the Expedition 22 crew, now [...]
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An eerie blue glow and ominous columns of
dark dust highlight M78 and other bright
reflection nebula
in the constellation of Orion.
The dark filamentary
dust not only absorbs light, but also reflects the
light of several bright blue stars that
formed recently in the nebula.
Of the two reflection nebulas
pictured above, the more famous [...]
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What creates these picturesque dark streaks on Mars?
No one knows for sure.
A leading hypothesis is that streaks like these are caused by
fine grained
sand sliding down the banks of troughs and craters.
Pictured above,
dark sand appears to have flowed hundreds of meters down the slopes of
Acheron Fossae.
The sand appears [...]
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