Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Dueling Bands in the Night -- What are these two bands in the sky? The more commonly seen band is the one on the right and is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun orbits in the disk of this spiral galaxy, so that from inside, this disk appears as a band of comparable brightness all the way around the sky. The Milky Way band can also be seen all year -- if out away from city lights. The less commonly seem band, on the left, is…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Record Prominence Imaged by Solar Orbiter -- What's happened to our Sun? Last month, it produced the largest prominence ever imaged together with a complete solar disk. The record image, featured, was captured in ultraviolet light by the Sun-orbiting Solar Orbiter spacecraft. A quiescent solar prominence is a cloud of hot gas held above the Sun's surface by the Sun's magnetic field. This solar prominence was huge -- spanning a length rivaling…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Spiral Galaxy NGC 2841 -- A mere 46 million light-years distant, spiral galaxy NGC 2841 can be found in the northern constellation of Ursa Major. This deep view of the gorgeous island universe was captured during 32 clear nights in November, December 2021 and January 2022. It shows off a striking yellow nucleus, galactic disk, and faint outer regions. Dust lanes, small star-forming regions, and young star clusters are embedded in the patchy,…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 The Multiwavelength Crab -- The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier's famous list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, expanding debris from massive star's death explosion, witnessed on planet Earth in 1054 AD. This brave new image offers a 21st century view of the Crab Nebula by presenting image data from across the electromagnetic spectrum as wavelengths of…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Interstellar Comet 2I Borisov -- From somewhere else in the Milky Way galaxy, Comet 2I/Borisov was just visiting the Solar System. Discovered by amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov on August 30, 2019, the first known interstellar comet is seen in these two Hubble Space Telescope images from November and December 2019. On the left, a distant background galaxy near the line-of-sight to Borisov is blurred as Hubble tracked the speeding comet and…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Venus and the Triply Ultraviolet Sun -- This was a very unusual type of solar eclipse. Typically, it is the Earth's Moon that eclipses the Sun. In 2012, though, the planet Venus took a turn. Like a solar eclipse by the Moon, the phase of Venus became a continually thinner crescent as Venus became increasingly better aligned with the Sun. Eventually the alignment became perfect and the phase of Venus dropped to zero. The dark spot of Venus…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 A Lion in Orion -- Yes, but can you see the lion? A deep exposure shows the famous dark indentation that looks like a horse's head, visible just left and below center, and known unsurprisingly as the Horsehead Nebula. The Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) is part of a vast complex of dark absorbing dust and bright glowing gas. To bring out details of the Horsehead's pasture, an astrophotographer artistically combined light accumulated for over 20…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Moon in Inverted Colors -- Which moon is this? It's Earth's moon -- but in inverted colors. Here, the pixel values corresponding to light and dark areas have been translated in reverse, or inverted, producing a false-color representation reminiscent of a black and white photographic negative. However, this is an inverted color image -- where the muted colors of the moon are real but digitally exaggerated before inversion. Normally bright rays…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 A Flower-Shaped Rock on Mars -- Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS -- It is one of the more unusual rocks yet found on Mars. Smaller than a penny, the rock has several appendages that make it look, to some, like a flower. Although it would be a major discovery if the rock was truly a fossilized ancient Martian flower, there are less spectacular -- and currently preferred -- explanations for its unusual structure. One theory that has emerged…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Globular Star Cluster 47 Tuc -- Image Credit & Copyright: Bernard Miller -- Globular star cluster 47 Tucanae is a jewel of the southern sky. Also known as NGC 104, it roams the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy along with some 200 other globular star clusters. The second brightest globular cluster (after Omega Centauri) as seen from planet Earth, 47 Tuc lies about 13,000 light-years away. It can be spotted with the naked-eye close on the sky to the…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 When Rainbows Smile -- Image Credit & Copyright: Marcella Giulia Pace -- Explanation: Want to see a rainbow smile? Look near the zenith (straight up) when the sun is low in the sky and you might. This example of an ice halo known as a circumzenithal arc was captured above a palm tree top from Ragusa, Sicily on February 24. The vividly colorful arcs are often called smiling rainbows because of their upside down curvature and colors. For…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Point Reyes Milky Way -- Image Credit & Copyright: Dan Zafra -- Explanation: Northern winter constellations and a long arc of the Milky Way are setting in this night skyscape looking toward the Pacific Ocean from Point Reyes on planet Earth's California coast. Sirius, alpha star of Canis Major, is prominent below the starry arc toward the left. Orion's yellowish Betelgeuse, Aldebaran in Taurus, and the blue tinted Pleiades star cluster also…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Colorful Airglow Bands Surround Milky Way -- Image Credit & Copyright: Xiaohan Wang -- Explanation: Why would the sky glow like a giant repeating rainbow? Airglow. Now air glows all of the time, but it is usually hard to see. A disturbance however -- like an approaching storm -- may cause noticeable rippling in the Earth's atmosphere. These gravity waves are oscillations in air analogous to those created when a rock is thrown in calm water. Red…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Star Formation in the Eagle Nebula -- Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & Copyright: Ignacio Diaz Bobillo & Diego Gravinese -- Explanation: Where do stars form? One place, star forming regions known as "EGGs", are being uncovered at the end of this giant pillar of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula (M16). Short for evaporating gaseous globules, EGGs are dense regions of mostly molecular hydrogen gas that fragment and gravitationally…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 A Road to the Stars -- Image Credit: ESO, Petr Horálek (ESO Photo Ambassador, Inst. of Physics in Opava) -- Explanation: Pictured -- a very scenic road to the stars. The road approaches La Silla Observatory in Chile, with the ESO's 3.6-meter telescope just up ahead. To the left are some futuristic-looking support structures for the planned BlackGEM telescopes, an array of optical telescopes that will help locate optical counterparts to…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 The Observable Universe -- Illustration Credit & Licence: Wikipedia, Pablo Carlos Budassi -- Explanation: How far can you see? Everything you can see, and everything you could possibly see, right now, assuming your eyes could detect all types of radiations around you -- is the observable universe. In light, the farthest we can see comes from the cosmic microwave background, a time 13.8 billion years ago when the universe was opaque like thick…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Centaurus A -- Image Credit & Copyright: David Alemazkour -- Explanation: A mere 11 million light-years away, Centaurus A is the closest active galaxy to planet Earth. Spanning over 60,000 light-years, the peculiar elliptical galaxy also known as NGC 5128, is featured in this sharp telescopic view. Centaurus A is apparently the result of a collision of two otherwise normal galaxies resulting in a fantastic jumble of star clusters and imposing…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 A Filament in Monoceros -- Image Credit & Copyright: Giorgio Ferrari -- Explanation: Bluish reflection nebulae seem to fill this dusty expanse. The sharp telescopic frame spans over 1 degree on the sky toward the faint but fanciful constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn. Seen within the Monoceros R1 cloud complex some 2,500 light-years away, bluish IC 447 is on the left, joined by a long dark filament of dust to IC 446 at lower right. Embedded in…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 2MASS J17554042+6551277 -- Image Credit : NASA, STScI, JWST -- Explanation: 2MASS J17554042+6551277 doesn't exactly roll off the tongue but that's the name, a coordinate-based catalog designation, of the star centered in this sharp field of view. Fans of the distant universe should get used to its spiky appearance though. The diffraction pattern is created by the 18 hexagonal mirror segments of the James Webb Space Telescope. After unfolding,…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 A Picturesque Equinox Sunset -- Image Credit & Copyright: Roland Christen -- Explanation: What's that at the end of the road? The Sun. Many towns have roads that run east - west, and on two days each year, the Sun rises and sets right down the middle. Today is one of those days: an equinox. Not only is today a day of equal night ("aequus"-"nox") and day time, but also a day when the sun rises precisely to the east and sets due west. Featured…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 The Sky in 2021 -- Image Credit & Copyright: Cees Bassa (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) -- Explanation: What if you could see the entire sky -- all at once -- for an entire year? That, very nearly, is what is pictured here. Every 15 minutes during 2021, an all-sky camera took an image of the sky over the Netherlands. Central columns from these images were then aligned and combined to create the featured keogram, with January at the…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 A Whale of an Aurora over Swedish Forest -- Image Credit & Copyright: Göran Strand -- Explanation: What's that in the sky? An aurora. A large coronal mass ejection occurred on our Sun earlier this month, throwing a cloud of fast-moving electrons, protons, and ions toward the Earth. Part of this cloud impacted our Earth's magnetosphere and, bolstered by a sudden gap, resulted in spectacular auroras being seen at some high northern latitudes.…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 The Bubble Nebula from Hubble -- Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble; Processing & Copyright: Mehmet Hakan Özsaraç -- Explanation: Massive stars can blow bubbles. The featured image shows perhaps the most famous of all star-bubbles, NGC 7635, also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. Although it looks delicate, the 7-light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Above and left of the Bubble's center is a hot, O-type star,…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Arp 78: Peculiar Galaxy in Aries -- Image Credit & License: International Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA Processing: T.A. Rector (Univ. Alaska Anchorage), J. Miller (Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab), M. Zamani & D. de Martin -- Explanation: Peculiar spiral galaxy Arp 78 is found within the boundaries of the head strong constellation Aries. Some 100 million light-years beyond the stars and nebulae of our Milky Way galaxy, the island…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 The Medusa Nebula -- Image Credit & Copyright: Damien Cannane -- Explanation: Braided and serpentine filaments of glowing gas suggest this nebula's popular name, The Medusa Nebula. Also known as Abell 21, this Medusa is an old planetary nebula some 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Gemini. Like its mythological namesake, the nebula is associated with a dramatic transformation. The planetary nebula phase represents a final stage in the…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Pluto at Night -- Image Credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest Research Institute -- Explanation: The night side of Pluto spans this shadowy scene. In the stunning space-based perspective the Sun is 4.9 billion kilometers (almost 4.5 light-hours) behind the dim and distant world. It was captured by far flung New Horizons in July of 2015 when the spacecraft was at a range of some 21,000 kilometers from Pluto, about 19 minutes after its…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Titan Seas Reflect Sunlight -- Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, U. Arizona, U. Idaho -- Explanation: Why would the surface of Titan light up with a blinding flash? The reason: a sunglint from liquid seas. Saturn's moon Titan has numerous smooth lakes of methane that, when the angle is right, reflect sunlight as if they were mirrors. Pictured here in false-color, the robotic Cassini spacecraft that orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017 imaged the…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Gems of a Maldivean Night -- Image Credit & Copyright: Petr Horálek (ESO Photo Ambassador, Inst. of Physics in Opava) -- Explanation: The southernmost part of the Milky Way contains not only the stars of the Southern Cross, but the closest star system to our Sun -- Alpha Centauri. The Southern Cross itself is topped by the bright, yellowish star Gamma Crucis. A line from Gamma Crucis through the blue star at the bottom of the cross, Acrux,…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Venus and Mars: Passing in the Night -- Image Credit & Copyright: Carlos Kiko Fairbairn -- Explanation: When two planets pass on the night sky, they can usually be seen near each other for a week or more. In the case of this planetary conjunction, Venus and Mars passed within 4 degrees of each other earlier this month. The featured image was taken a few days prior, when Venus was slowing rising in the pre-dawn sky, night by night, while Mars…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Firefly Milky Way over Russia -- Image Credit & Copyright: Anton Komlev -- Explanation: It started with a pine tree. The idea was to photograph a statuesque pine in front of the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. And the plan, carried out two months ago, was successful -- they both appear prominently. But the resulting 3-frame panorama captured much more. Colorful stars, for example, dot the distant background, with bright Altair visible on…
Astronomy Picture of the Day 🔭 Exploring the Antennae -- Image Credit & Copyright: Dietmar Hager, Eric Benson -- Explanation: Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus, two large galaxies are colliding. Stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, very rarely collide in the course of the ponderous cataclysm that lasts for hundreds of millions of years. But the galaxies' large clouds of molecular gas and dust often do, triggering…
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