Astronomy Picture of the Day

© Brian Meyers

🌌NGC 6960: The Witch's Broom Nebula Ten thousand years ago, before the dawn of recorded human history, a new light would suddenly have appeared in the night sky and faded after a few weeks. Today we know this light was from a supernova, or exploding star, and record the expanding debris cloud as the Veil Nebula, a supernova remnant. This sharp telescopic view is centered on a western segment of ...

© Victor Sabet & Julien De Winter

🌌Comet Lemmon Brightens Comet Lemmon is brightening and moving into morning northern skies. Besides Comet SWAN25B and Comet ATLAS, Comet C/2025 A6 (Lemmon) is now the third comet currently visible with binoculars and on long camera exposures. Comet Lemmon was discovered early this year and is still headed into the inner Solar System. The comet will round the Sun on November 8, but first it will ...

© Luc Perrot (TWAN)

🌌Two Camera Comets in One Sky It may look like these comets are racing, but they are not. Comets C/2025 K1 ATLAS (left) and C/2025 R2 SWAN (right) appeared near each other by chance last week in the featured image taken from France's Reunion Island in the southern Indian Ocean. Fainter Comet ATLAS is approaching our Sun and will reach its closest approach in early October when it is also expecte ...

🌌Leopard Spots on Martian Rocks What is creating these unusual spots? Light-colored spots on Martian rocks, each surrounded by a dark border, were discovered last year by NASA's Perseverance Rover currently exploring Mars. Dubbed leopard spots because of their seemingly similarity to markings on famous Earth-bound predators, these curious patterns are being studied with the possibility they were ...

© Pascal Fouquet

🌌A Rocket in the Sun On the morning of September 24 a rocket crosses the bright solar disk in this long range telescopic snapshot captured from Orlando, Florida. That's about 50 miles north of its Kennedy Space Center launch site. This rocket carried three new space weather missions to space. Signals have now been successfully acquired from all three - NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleratio ...

© Adam Block

🌌A SWAN, an ATLAS, and Mars A new visitor to the inner Solar System, comet C/2025 R2 (SWAN) sports a long ion tail extending diagonally across this almost 7 degree wide telescopic field of view recorded on September 21. A fainter fellow comet also making its inner Solar System debut, C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), can be spotted above and left of SWAN's greenish coma, just visible against the background sea ...

© Jin Wang

🌌Saturn Opposite the Sun This year Saturn was at opposition on September 21, opposite the Sun in planet Earth's sky. At its closest to Earth, Saturn was also at its brightest of the year, rising as the Sun set and shining above the horizon all night long among the fainter stars of the constellation Pisces. In this snapshot from the Qinghai Lenghu Observatory, Tibetan Plateau, southwestern China, ...

🌌GW250114: Rotating Black Holes Collide It was the strongest gravitational wave signal yet measured -- what did it show? GW250114 was detected by both arms of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in Washington and Louisiana USA earlier this year. Analysis showed that the event was created when two black holes, each of mass around 33 times the mass of the Sun, coalesced ...

🌌Astronomy Picture of the Day How massive can a normal star be? Estimates made from distance, brightness and standard solar models had given one star in the open cluster Pismis 24 over 200 times the mass of our Sun, making it one of the most massive stars known. This star is the brightest object located in the central cavity near the bottom center of the featured image taken with the Webb Space ...