Astronomy Picture of the Day
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@nasa_apod
Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
provided by NASA and Michigan Technological University (MTU).
Astronomy Picture of the Day
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🌌Three Clusters in Puppis
Galactic or open star clusters are young. The swarms of stars are born together near the plane of the Milky Way, but their numbers steadily dwindle as cluster members are ejected by galactic tides and gravitational interactions. Caught in this telescopic frame over three degrees across are three good examples of galactic star clusters, seen toward the southern sky's nau ...
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🌌Chamaeleon I Molecular Cloud
Dark markings and bright nebulae in this telescopic southern sky view are telltale signs of young stars and active star formation. They lie a mere 650 light-years away, at the boundary of the local bubble and the Chamaeleon molecular cloud complex. Regions with young stars identified as dusty reflection nebulae from the 1946 Cederblad catalog include the C-shaped Ce ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
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🌌Eiffel Tower Prominence on the Sun
What's that on the Sun? Although it may look like a flowing version of the Eiffel Tower, it is a solar prominence that is actually much bigger -- about the height of Jupiter. The huge prominence emerged about ten days ago, hovered over the Sun's surface for about two days, and then erupted -- throwing a coronal mass ejection (CME) into the Solar System. The fe ...
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🌌Terminator Moon
What's different about this Moon? It's the terminators. In the featured image, you can't directly see any terminator -- the line that divides the light of day from the dark of night. That's because the image is a digital composite of 29 near-terminator lunar strips. Terminator regions show the longest and most prominent shadows -- shadows which, by their contrast and length, all ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
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🌌In the Heart of the Heart Nebula
What excites the Heart Nebula? First, the large emission nebula dubbed IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart. Its shape perhaps fitting of the Valentine's Day, this heart glows brightly in red light emitted by its most prominent element: excited hydrogen. The red glow and the larger shape are all created by a small group of stars near the nebula's center. ...
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🌌Earth at Night
This is what the Earth looks like at night. Can you find your favorite country or city? Surprisingly, city lights make this task quite possible. Human-made lights highlight particularly developed or populated areas of the Earth's surface, including the seaboards of Europe, the eastern United States, and Japan. Many large cities are located near rivers or oceans so that they can e ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
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🌌Aurora by Moonlight
The ice was singing as light from a bright gibbous Moon cast shadows across this frozen lake, about 20 kilometers north of Stockholm, Sweden, planet Earth. In the alluring night skyscape captured on February 10, shimmering auroral curtains of light dance in the evening sky. On that northern night nature's performance included the auroral displays fostered by a minor geomagne ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
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🌌IC 342: The Hidden Galaxy in Camelopardalis
Similar in size to large, bright spiral galaxies in our neighborhood, IC 342 is a mere 10 million light-years distant in the long-necked, northern constellation Camelopardalis. A sprawling island universe, IC 342 would otherwise be a prominent galaxy in our night sky, but it is hidden from clear view and only glimpsed through the veil of stars, gas an ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
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🌌T Tauri and Hind's Variable Nebula
The star with an orange tint near top center in this dusty telescopic frame is T Tauri, prototype of the class of T Tauri variable stars. Next to it (right) is a yellow cosmic cloud historically known as Hind's Variable Nebula (NGC 1555). About 650 light-years away, at the boundary of the local bubble and the Taurus molecular cloud, both star and nebula are se ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
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🌌Eta Car: 3D Model of the Most Dangerous Star Known
What's the most dangerous star near earth? Many believe it's Eta Carinae, a binary star system about 100 times the mass of the Sun, just 10,000 light years from earth. Eta Carinae is a ticking time bomb, set to explode as a supernova in only a few million years, when it may bathe the earth in dangerous gamma rays. The star suffered a notorious ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
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🌌Aurora and Light Pillars over Norway
Which half of this sky is your favorite? On the left, the night sky is lit up by particles expelled from the Sun that later collided with Earth's upper atmosphere — creating bright auroras. On the right, the night glows with ground lights reflected by millions of tiny ice crystals falling from the sky — creating light pillars. And in the center, the astropho ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
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🌌NGC 4651: The Umbrella Galaxy
It's raining stars. What appears to be a giant cosmic umbrella is now known to be a tidal stream of stars stripped from a small satellite galaxy. The main galaxy, spiral galaxy NGC 4651, is about the size of our Milky Way, while its stellar parasol appears to extend some 100 thousand light-years above this galaxy's bright disk. A small galaxy was likely torn apart ...
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🌌Blue Marble Earth
Welcome to planet Earth, the third planet from a star named the Sun. The Earth is shaped like a sphere and composed mostly of rock. Over 70 percent of the Earth's surface is water. The planet has a relatively thin atmosphere composed mostly of nitrogen and oxygen. The featured picture of Earth, dubbed The Blue Marble, was taken from Apollo 17 in 1972 and features Africa and An ...
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🌌Symbiotic R Aquarii
Variable star R Aquarii is actually an interacting binary star system, two stars that seem to have a close symbiotic relationship. Centered in this space-based optical/x-ray composite image it lies about 710 light years away. The intriguing system consists of a cool red giant star and hot, dense white dwarf star in mutual orbit around their common center of mass. With binocu ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
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🌌Moons at Twilight
ven though Jupiter was the only planet visible in the evening sky on February 2, it shared the twilight above the western horizon with the Solar System's brightest moons. In a single exposure made just after sunset, the Solar System's ruling gas giant is at the upper right in this telephoto field-of-view from Cancun, Mexico. The snapshot also captures our fair planet's own nat ...
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🌌Embraced by Sunlight
ven though Venus (left) was the brightest planet in the sky it was less than 1/30th the apparent size of the Moon on January 29. But as both rose before the Sun they shared a crescent phase. For a moment their visible disks were each about 12 percent illuminated as they stood above the southeastern horizon. The similar sunlit crescents were captured in these two separate im ...
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🌌The Galactic Center in Radio from MeerKAT
What's happening at the center of our galaxy? It's hard to tell with optical telescopes since visible light is blocked by intervening interstellar dust. In other bands of light, though, such as radio, the galactic center can be imaged and shows itself to be quite an interesting and active place. The featured picture shows the latest image of our Milky W ...
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🌌Moon Phases 2022
What will the Moon phase be on your birthday this year? It is hard to predict because the Moon's appearance changes nightly. As the Moon orbits the Earth, the half illuminated by the Sun first becomes increasingly visible, then decreasingly visible. The featured video animates images and altitude data taken by NASA's Moon-orbiting Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to show all 12 lun ...
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🌌Carina Nebula North
The Great Carina Nebula is home to strange stars and iconic nebulas. Named for its home constellation, the huge star-forming region is larger and brighter than the Great Orion Nebula but less well known because it is so far south -- and because so much of humanity lives so far north. The featured image shows in great detail the northern-most part of the Carina Nebula. Visibl ...
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🌌A Solar Prominence from SOHO
How can gas float above the Sun?
🔗 https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220130.html
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🌌The Fornax Cluster of Galaxies
Named for the southern constellation toward which most of its galaxies can be found, the Fornax Cluster is one of the closest clusters of galaxies. About 62 million light-years away, it is almost 20 times more distant than our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy, and only about 10 percent farther than the better known and more populated Virgo Galaxy Cluster. Seen across ...
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🌌Western Moon, Eastern Sea
The Mare Orientale, Latin for Eastern Sea, is one of the most striking large scale lunar features. The youngest of the large lunar impact basins it's very difficult to see from an earthbound perspective. Still, taken during a period of favorable tilt, or libration of the lunar nearside, the Eastern Sea can be found near top center in this sharp telescopic view, extreme ...
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🌌South of Orion
South of the large star-forming region known as the Orion Nebula, lies bright blue reflection nebula NGC 1999. At the edge of the Orion molecular cloud complex some 1,500 light-years distant, NGC 1999's illumination is provided by the embedded variable star V380 Orionis. The nebula is marked with a dark sideways T-shape at center right in this telescopic vista that spans about tw ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
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🌌Stars, Dust, and Gas Near Antares
Why is the sky near Antares and Rho Ophiuchi so dusty yet colorful? The colors result from a mixture of objects and processes. Fine dust -- illuminated from the front by starlight -- produces blue reflection nebulae. Gaseous clouds whose atoms are excited by ultraviolet starlight produce reddish emission nebulae. Backlit dust clouds block starlight and so appea ...
Astronomy Picture of the Day
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🌌Video: Comet Leonard over One Hour
Which direction is this comet heading? Judging by the tail, one might imagine that Comet Leonard is traveling towards the bottom right, but a full 3D analysis shows it traveling almost directly away from the camera. With this perspective, the dust tail is trailed towards the camera and can only be seen as a short yellow-white glow near the head of the comet. T ...
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🌌Rigel and the Witch Head Nebula
By starlight this eerie visage shines in the dark, a crooked profile evoking its popular name, the Witch Head Nebula. In fact, this entrancing telescopic portrait gives the impression that the witch has fixed her gaze on Orion's bright supergiant star Rigel. More formally known as IC 2118, the Witch Head Nebula spans about 50 light-years and is composed of inters ...
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🌌Saturn, Tethys, Rings, and Shadows
Seen from ice moon Tethys, rings and shadows would display fantastic views of the Saturnian system. Haven't dropped in on Tethys lately? Then this gorgeous ringscape from the Cassini spacecraft will have to do for now. Caught in sunlight just below and left of picture center in 2005, Tethys itself is about 1,000 kilometers in diameter and orbits not quite five ...