This surprising sky has almost everything. First, slanting down from the upper left and far in the distance is the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. More modestly, slanting […]

The Great Nebula in Orion is a colorful place. Visible to the unaided eye, it appears as a small fuzzy patch in the constellation of Orion. Long exposure, multi-wavelength images […]

In digital brush strokes, Jupiter’s signature atmospheric bands and vortices were used to form this interplanetary post-impressionist work of art. The creative image from citizen scientist Rick Lundh uses data […]

In late March, the comet now designated C/2025 F2 SWAN was found independently by citizen scientists Vladimir Bezugly, Michael Mattiazzo, and Rob Matson while examining publicly available image data from […]

What happens when a star runs out of nuclear fuel? For stars like our Sun, the center condenses into a white dwarf while the outer atmosphere is expelled into space […]

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, […]

From a garden on planet Earth, 38 hours of exposure with a camera and small telescope produced this cosmic photo of the M81 galaxy group. In fact, the group’s dominant […]

What’s at the tip of this interstellar jet? First let’s consider the jet: it is being expelled by a star system just forming and is cataloged as Herbig-Haro 49 (HH […]

Sometimes, the Moon visits the Pleiades. Technically, this means that the orbit of our Moon takes it directly in front of the famous Pleiades star cluster, which is far in […]

How much mass do flocculent spirals hide? The featured image of flocculent spiral galaxy NGC 4414 was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope to help answer this question. Flocculent spirals […]