Astronomy Picture of the Day

🌌The Egg Nebula in Polarized Light Where is the center of the Egg Nebula? Emerging from a cosmic egg, the star in the center of the Egg Nebula is casting away shells of gas and dust as it slowly transforms itself into a white dwarf star. The Egg Nebula is a rapidly evolving pre- planetary nebula spanning about one light year. It lies some 3,000 light-years away toward the northern constellation ...

🌌M100: A Grand Design Spiral Galaxy Majestic on a truly cosmic scale, M100 is appropriately known as a grand design spiral galaxy. It is a large galaxy of over 100 billion stars with well-defined spiral arms that is similar to our own Milky Way Galaxy. One of the brightest members of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, M100 (alias NGC 4321) is 56 million light-years distant toward the constellation o ...

🌌Rigel Wide Brilliant, blue, supergiant star Rigel marks the foot of Orion the Hunter in planet Earth's night. Designated Beta Orionis, it's at the center of this remarkably deep and wide field of view. Rigel's blue color indicates that it is much hotter than its rival supergiant in Orion the yellowish Betelgeuse (Alpha Orionis), though both stars are massive enough to eventually end their days ...

🌌Terran 1 Burns Methalox Relativity's Terran 1 Rocket is mostly 3D-printed. It burns a cryogenic rocket fuel composed of liquid methane and liquid oxygen (methalox). In this close-up of a Terran 1 launch on the night of March 22 from Cape Canaveral, icy chunks fall through the stunning frame as intense blue exhaust streams from its nine Aeon 1 engines. In a largely successful flight the inovativ ...

🌌Rubin's Galaxy In this Hubble Space Telescope image the bright, spiky stars lie in the foreground toward the heroic northern constellation Perseus and well within our own Milky Way galaxy. In sharp focus beyond is UGC 2885, a giant spiral galaxy about 232 million light-years distant. Some 800,000 light-years across compared to the Milky Way's diameter of 100,000 light-years or so, it has around ...

🌌Olympus Mons: Largest Volcano in the Solar System The largest volcano in our Solar System is on Mars. Although three times higher than Earth's Mount Everest, Olympus Mons will not be difficult for humans to climb because of the volcano's shallow slopes and Mars' low gravity. Covering an area greater than the entire Hawaiian volcano chain, the slopes of Olympus Mons typically rise only a few deg ...

🌌The Galactic Center Radio Arc What causes this unusual curving structure near the center of our Galaxy? The long parallel rays slanting across the top of the featured radio image are known collectively as the Galactic Center Radio Arc and point out from the Galactic plane. The Radio Arc is connected to the Galactic Center by strange curving filaments known as the Arches. The bright radio struct ...

🌌M57: The Ring Nebula from Hubble It was noticed hundreds of years ago by stargazers who could not understand its unusual shape. It looked like a ring on the sky. Except for the rings of Saturn, the Ring Nebula (M57) may be the most famous celestial circle. We now know what it is, and that its iconic shape is due to our lucky perspective. The recent mapping of the expanding nebula's 3-D structur ...

© Nicolas Rolland

🌌NGC 2442: Galaxy in Volans Distorted galaxy NGC 2442 can be found in the southern constellation of the flying fish, (Piscis) Volans. Located about 50 million light-years away, the galaxy's two spiral arms extending from a pronounced central bar give it a hook-shaped appearance in this deep colorful image, with spiky foreground stars scattered across the telescopic field of view. The image also ...

🌌Seeing Titan Shrouded in a thick atmosphere, Saturn's largest moon Titan really is hard to see. Small particles suspended in the upper atmosphere cause an almost impenetrable haze, strongly scattering light at visible wavelengths and hiding Titan's surface features from prying eyes. But Titan's surface is better imaged at infrared wavelengths where scattering is weaker and atmospheric absorptio ...

© Matias Tomasello

🌌NGC 4372 and the Dark Doodad The delightful Dark Doodad Nebula drifts through southern skies, a tantalizing target for binoculars toward the small constellation Musca, The Fly. The dusty cosmic cloud is seen against rich starfields just south of the Coalsack Nebula and the Southern Cross. Stretching for about 3 degrees across the center of this telephoto field of view, the Dark Doodad is punctu ...

© Aleix RoigAstroCatInfo

🌌Sh2-308: A Dolphin Shaped Star Bubble Which star created this bubble? It wasn't the bright star on the bubble's right. And it also wasn't a giant space dolphin. It was the star in the blue nebula's center, a famously energetic Wolf-Rayet star. Wolf-Rayet stars in general have over 20 times the mass of our Sun and expel fast particle winds that can create iconic looking nebulas. In this case, th ...

© T. SlovinskýP. HorálekIoP OpavaCTIONOIRLabNSFAURA

🌌A Multiple Green Flash Sunset Yes, but can your green flash do this? A green flash at sunset is a rare event that many Sun watchers pride themselves on having seen.  Once thought to be a myth, a green flash is now understood to occur when the Earth's atmosphere acts like both a prism and a lens. Different atmospheric layers create altitude-variable refraction that takes light from the top of th ...

© Cari Letelier

🌌Aurora Over Arctic Henge Reports of powerful solar flares started a seven-hour quest north to capture modern monuments against an aurora-filled sky. The peaks of iconic Arctic Henge in Raufarhöfn in northern Iceland were already aligned with the stars: some are lined up toward the exact north from one side and toward exact south from the other. The featured image, taken after sunset late last m ...

🌌Wanderers How far out will humanity explore? If this video's fusion of real space imagery and fictional space visualizations is on the right track, then at least the Solar System. Some of the video's wondrous sequences depict future humans drifting through the rings of Saturn, exploring Jupiter from a nearby spacecraft, and jumping off a high cliff in the low gravity of a moon of Uranus. Althou ...

© Giorgia Hofer

🌌Venus and the Da Vinci Glow On March 23 early evening skygazers could watch Venus and a young crescent moon, both near the western horizon. On that date Earth's brilliant evening star, faint lunar night side and slender sunlit crescent were captured in this telephoto skyscape posing alongside a church tower from Danta di Cadore, Dolomiti, Italy. Of course the subtle lunar illumination is earths ...

© Former darling

🌌Outbound Comet ZTF Former darling of the northern sky Comet C/2022E3 (ZTF) has faded. During its closest approach to our fair planet in early February Comet ZTF was a mere 2.3 light-minutes distant. Then known as the green comet, this visitor from the remote Oort Cloud is now nearly 13.3 light-minutes away. In this deep image, composed of exposures captured on March 21, the comet still sports a ...

© Roberto Marinoni

🌌Spiral Galaxy NGC 2841 A mere 46 million light-years distant, spiral galaxy NGC 2841 can be found in planet Earth's night sky toward the northern constellation of Ursa Major. This sharp image centered on the gorgeous island universe also captures spiky foreground Milky Way stars and more distant background galaxies within the same telescopic field of view. It shows off the bright nucleus of NGC ...

© Abdullah Al-Harbi

🌌M31: The Andromeda Galaxy How far can you see? The most distant object easily visible to the unaided eye is M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy, over two million light-years away. Without a telescope, even this immense spiral galaxy appears as an unremarkable, faint, nebulous cloud in the constellation Andromeda. But a bright white nucleus, dark winding dust lanes, luminous blue spiral arms, and br ...

© Vikas Chander

🌌Dark Nebulae and Star Formation in Taurus Can dust be beautiful? Yes, and it can also be useful. The Taurus molecular cloud has several bright stars, but it is the dark dust that really draws attention. The pervasive dust has waves and ripples and makes picturesque dust bunnies, but perhaps more importantly, it marks regions where interstellar gas is dense enough to gravitationally contract to ...

🌌M1: The Expanding Crab Nebula Are your eyes good enough to see the Crab Nebula expand? The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first on Charles Messier's famous list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, an expanding cloud of debris from the explosion of a massive star. The violent birth of the Crab was witnessed by astronomers in the year 105 ...

© Robert Fedez

🌌Equinox at the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent To see the feathered serpent descend the Mayan pyramid requires exquisite timing. You must visit El Castillo -- in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula -- near an equinox. Then, during the late afternoon if the sky is clear, the pyramid's own shadows create triangles that merge into the famous illusion of a slithering viper. Also known as the Temple of Kuku ...

🌌Wolf-Rayet 124 Driven by powerful stellar winds, expanding shrouds of gas and dust frame hot, luminous star Wolf-Rayet 124 in this sharp infrared view. The eye-catching 6-spike star pattern is characteristic of stellar images made with the 18 hexagonal mirrors of the James Webb Space Telescope. About 15,000 light-years distant toward the pointed northern constellation Sagitta, WR 124 has over 3 ...

© Chesterfield Astronomical Society

🌌The Medusa Nebula Braided and serpentine filaments of glowing gas suggest this nebula's popular name, The Medusa Nebula. Also known as Abell 21, this Medusa is an old planetary nebula some 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Gemini. Like its mythological namesake, the nebula is associated with a dramatic transformation. The planetary nebula phase represents a final stage in the evolutio ...

© Neil Corke

🌌Millions of Stars in Omega Centauri Globular star cluster Omega Centauri, also known as NGC 5139, is 15,000 light-years away. The cluster is packed with about 10 million stars much older than the Sun within a volume about 150 light-years in diameter. It's the largest and brightest of 200 or so known globular clusters that roam the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Though most star clusters consist ...

© Michael LuyTrier Observatory

🌌Jupiter and Venus Converge over Germany This was a sky to show the kids. Early this month the two brightest planets in the night sky, Jupiter and Venus, appeared to converge. At their closest, the two planets were separated by only about the angular width of the full moon. The spectacle occurred just after sunset and was seen and photographed all across planet Earth. The displayed image was tak ...