Promoting science and technology education through spaceflight and weather balloons.

Spiral Galaxy NGC 2566 from Webb

By |2025-05-26T09:09:08-04:00May 26th, 2025|Categories: NASA News, Uncategorized|Tags: , , , , , |

Photo of the Day What’s happening in the center of spiral galaxy NGC 2566? First, the eight rays that appear to be coming out of the center in the featured infrared image are not real — they are diffraction spikes caused by the mechanical structure of the Webb space telescope itself. The center of [...]

Gaia Reconstructs a Top View of our Galaxy

By |2025-05-13T09:09:06-04:00May 13th, 2025|Categories: NASA News, Uncategorized|Tags: , , , , , |

Photo of the Day What does our Milky Way Galaxy look like from the top? Because we are on the inside, humanity can’t get an actual picture. Recently, however, just such a map has been made using location data for over a billion stars from ESA’s Gaia mission. The resulting featured illustration shows that [...]

Gaia Reconstructs a Side View of our Galaxy

By |2025-05-12T09:09:11-04:00May 12th, 2025|Categories: NASA News, Uncategorized|Tags: , , , , , |

Photo of the Day What does our Milky Way Galaxy look like from the side? Because we are on the inside, humanity can’t get an actual picture. Recently, however, just such a map has been made using location data for over a billion stars from ESA’s Gaia mission. The resulting featured illustration shows that [...]

Galaxy Wars: M81 versus M82

By |2025-05-07T09:09:10-04:00May 7th, 2025|Categories: NASA News, Uncategorized|Tags: , , , , , |

Photo of the Day In the upper left corner, surrounded by blue arms and dotted with red nebulas, is spiral galaxy M81. In the lower right corner, marked by a light central line and surrounded by red glowing gas, is irregular galaxy M82. This stunning vista shows these two mammoth galaxies locked in gravitational [...]

Galaxy Lenses Galaxy from Webb

By |2025-04-21T09:09:08-04:00April 21st, 2025|Categories: NASA News, Uncategorized|Tags: , , , , , |

Photo of the Day Is this one galaxy or two? Although it looks like one, the answer is two. One path to this happening is when a small galaxy collides with a larger galaxy and ends up in the center. But in the featured image, something more rare is going on. Here, the central [...]

The Shells and Jets of Galaxy Centaurus A

By |2024-12-11T08:09:07-05:00December 11th, 2024|Categories: NASA News, Uncategorized|Tags: , , , , , |

Photo of the Day What's the closest active galaxy to planet Earth? That would be Centaurus A, cataloged as NGC 5128, which is only 12 million light-years distant. Forged in a collision of two otherwise normal galaxies, Centaurus A shows several distinctive features including a dark dust lane across its center, outer shells of [...]

NGC 300: A Galaxy of Stars

By |2024-12-02T08:09:06-05:00December 2nd, 2024|Categories: NASA News, Uncategorized|Tags: , , , , , |

Photo of the Day This galaxy is unusual for how many stars it seems that you can see. Stars are so abundantly evident in this deep exposure of the spiral galaxy NGC 300 because so many of these stars are bright blue and grouped into resolvable bright star clusters. Additionally, NGC 300 is so [...]

The Sombrero Galaxy from Webb and Hubble

By |2024-11-26T08:09:06-05:00November 26th, 2024|Categories: NASA News, Uncategorized|Tags: , , , , , |

Photo of the Day This floating ring is the size of a galaxy. In fact, it is a galaxy -- or at least part of one: the photogenic Sombrero Galaxy is one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. The dark band of dust that obscures the mid-section of the [...]

M106: A Spiral Galaxy with a Strange Center

By |2024-10-09T09:09:09-04:00October 9th, 2024|Categories: NASA News, Uncategorized|Tags: , , , , , |

Photo of the Day What's happening at the center of spiral galaxy M106? A swirling disk of stars and gas, M106's appearance is dominated by blue spiral arms and red dust lanes near the nucleus, as shown in the featured image taken from the Kuwaiti desert. The core of M106 glows brightly in radio [...]

The Tadpole Galaxy from Hubble

By |2024-07-15T09:09:08-04:00July 15th, 2024|Categories: NASA News, Uncategorized|Tags: , , , , , |

Photo of the Day Why does this galaxy have such a long tail? In this stunning vista, based on image data from the Hubble Legacy Archive, distant galaxies form a dramatic backdrop for disrupted spiral galaxy Arp 188, the Tadpole Galaxy. The cosmic tadpole is a mere 420 million light-years distant toward the northern [...]

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