No sudden, sharp boundary marks the passage of day into night in this gorgeous view of ocean and clouds over our fair planet Earth. Instead, the shadow line or terminator […]

Viewed face-on, grand spiral galaxy NGC 5643 has a festive appearance in this colorful cosmic portrait. Some 55 million light-years distant, the galaxy extends for over 100,000 light-years, seen within […]

The stars are not alone. In the disk of our Milky Way Galaxy, about 10 percent of visible matter is in the form of gas called the interstellar medium (ISM). […]

A year in sunsets, from April 2023 to March 2024, track along the western horizon in these stacked panoramic views. The well-planed sequence is constructed of images recorded near the […]

On the night of December 15, the Full Moon was bright. Known to some as the Cold Moon or the Long Night Moon, it was the closest Full Moon to […]

After the Crab Nebula, this giant star cluster is the second entry in 18th century astronomer Charles Messier’s famous list of things that are not comets. M2 is one of […]

What kind of strange galaxy is this? This rare structure is known as a polar ring galaxy, and it seems to have two different rings of stars. In this galaxy, […]

What excites the Heart Nebula? First, the large emission nebula on the upper left, catalogued as IC 1805, looks somewhat like a human heart. The nebula glows brightly in red […]

This kilometer high cliff occurs on the surface of a comet. It was discovered on the dark nucleus of Comet Churyumov – Gerasimenko (CG) by Rosetta, a robotic spacecraft launched […]

Meteors have been flowing out from the constellation Gemini. This was expected, as mid-December is the time of the Geminid Meteor Shower. Pictured here, over two dozen meteors were caught […]