While drifting through the cosmos, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud became sculpted by stellar winds and radiation to assume a recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is embedded […]
The Perseverance rover’s Mastcam-Z captured images to create this mosaic on August 4, 2022. The car-sized robot was continuing its exploration of the fan-shaped delta of a river that, billions […]
The Tarantula Nebula, also known as 30 Doradus, is more than a thousand light-years in diameter, a giant star forming region within nearby satellite galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud. About […]
For northern hemisphere dwellers, September’s Full Moon was the Harvest Moon. Reflecting warm hues at sunset it rises over the historic town of Castiglione di Sicilia in this telephoto view […]
It is one of the largest nebulas on the sky — why isn’t it better known? Roughly the same angular size as the Andromeda Galaxy, the Great Lacerta Nebula can […]
Earlier this month, the Sun exhibited one of the longer filaments on record. Visible as the bright curving streak around the image center, the snaking filament’s full extent was estimated […]
What are those red filaments in the sky? They are a rarely seen form of lightning confirmed only about 35 years ago: red sprites. Research has shown that following a […]
How does your favorite planet spin? Does it spin rapidly around a nearly vertical axis, or horizontally, or backwards? The featured video animates NASA images of all eight planets in […]
This 180 degree panoramic night skyscape captures our Milky Way Galaxy as it arcs above the horizon on a winter’s night in August. Near midnight, the galactic center is close […]
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 on a grand tour of the outer planets of the Solar System. They have become the longest operating and most distant […]