Photo of the Day The diffuse hydrogen-alpha glow of emission region Sh2-27 fills this cosmic scene. The field of view spans nearly 3 degrees across the nebula-rich constellation Ophiuchus toward the central Milky Way. A Dark Veil of wispy interstellar dust clouds draped across the foreground is chiefly identified as LDN 234 and LDN [...]
Photo of the Day That yellow spot -- what is it? It's a young planet outside our Solar System. The featured image from the Very Large Telescope in Chile surprisingly captures a distant scene much like our own Solar System's birth, some 4.5 billion years ago. Although we can't look into the past and [...]
Photo of the Day Sometimes even the sky surprises you. To see more stars and faint nebulosity in the Pleiades star cluster (M45), long exposures are made. Many times, less interesting items appear on the exposures that were not intended -- but later edited out. These include stuck pixels, cosmic ray hits, frames with [...]
Photo of the Day At the core of the Crab Nebula lies a city-sized, magnetized neutron star spinning 30 times a second. Known as the Crab Pulsar, it is the bright spot in the center of the gaseous swirl at the nebula's core. About twelve light-years across, the spectacular picture frames the glowing gas, [...]
Photo of the Day This colorful telescopic view towards the musical northern constellation Lyra reveals the faint outer halos and brighter central ring-shaped region of M57, popularly known as the Ring Nebula. To modern astronomers M57 is a well-known planetary nebula. With a central ring about one light-year across, M57 is definitely not a [...]
Photo of the Day What are those curved arcs in the sky? Meteors -- specifically, meteors from this year's Perseid meteor shower. Over the past few weeks, after the sky darkened, many images of Perseid meteors were captured separately and merged into a single frame, taken earlier. Although the meteors all traveled on straight [...]
Photo of the Day This galaxy is not only pretty -- it's useful. A gorgeous spiral some 100 million light-years distant, NGC 1309 lies on the banks of the constellation of the River (Eridanus). NGC 1309 spans about 30,000 light-years, making it about one third the size of our larger Milky Way galaxy. Bluish [...]
Photo of the Day What kind of clouds are these? Although their cause is presently unknown, such unusual atmospheric structures, as menacing as they might seem, do not appear to be harbingers of meteorological doom. Formally recognized as a distinct cloud type only last year, asperitas clouds can be stunning in appearance, unusual in [...]
Photo of the Day In 1716, English astronomer Edmond Halley noted, "This is but a little Patch, but it shews itself to the naked Eye, when the Sky is serene and the Moon absent." Of course, M13 is now less modestly recognized as the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules, one of the brightest globular [...]
Photo of the Day What lies in the heart of Orion? Trapezium: four bright stars, that can be found near the center of this sharp cosmic portrait. Gathered within a region about 1.5 light-years in radius, these stars dominate the core of the dense Orion Nebula Star Cluster. Ultraviolet ionizing radiation from the Trapezium [...]
