Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
Europa: The Latest From Galileo17.01.1997
Today, NASA revealed recent results from the Galileo Probe's December 19th flyby of Europa, Jupiter's ice-covered moon - including this close-up image of fractured and frozen terrrain. The highest resolution picture ever made...
Trapezium: Teardrops in My Skies
16.01.1997
Sometimes the unexpected comes in a familiar shape. In this recently released picture, the seemingly familiar teardrop-shaped object just right of center is actually an unusually situated disk of gas and dust. In fact, the teardrop is about the size of our own Solar System and is racing against time to condense and form planets.
Black Hole Signature From Advective Disks
15.01.1997
What does a black hole look like? If alone, a black hole would indeed appear quite black, but many black hole candidates are part of binary star systems. So how does a black hole binary system look different from a neutron star binary system? The above drawings indicate it is difficult to tell!
Black Holes and Galactic Centers
14.01.1997
Do all galaxies have black holes at their centers? Although not even a single galaxy has yet been proven to have a central black hole, the list of candidates has increased yet again. Recent...
Sunspots: Magnetic Depressions
13.01.1997
Our Sun has spots! These spots appear dark in photographs like the one above, but in fact sunspots are quite bright - they are just dark compared to the rest of the Sun. Sunspots are about the size of the Earth and frequently occur in groups, as shown above.
Mercury in Stereo: Craters Within Craters
12.01.1997
This Stereo image pair of craters on on Mercury was produced using data from NASA's robot explorer Mariner 10 which performed three close flybys of the Sun's closest companion, two in 1974 and one in 1975. However, the spacecraft was not equipped with a Stereo camera!
Titania's Trenches
11.01.1997
British astronomer Sir William Herschel discovered Titania and Oberon in 1787, 210 years ago today. He wasn't reading Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream though, he was making the first telescopic observations of moons of the planet Uranus (a planet which he himself discovered in 1781).
Eclipsed Moon in Infrared
10.01.1997
Last September's total lunar eclipse disappointed many observers in the Eastern and Midwestern US who were cursed with cloudy skies. However, the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) satellite had a spectacular view from Earth orbit and SPIRIT III, an onboard imaging infrared telescope, was used to repeatedly image the moon during the eclipse.
Hazing Jupiter
9.01.1997
A dramatic mosaic of recent images from the Galileo spacecraft reveals details of swirling clouds and a thick stratospheric haze in the atmosphere of Jupiter, the Solar System's largest planet. This false color...
Grey Sun Seething
8.01.1997
The Sun's surface is not smooth. It has thousands of bumps called granules and usually a few dark depressions called sunspots. Each of the numerous granules is the size of an Earth continent, but much shorter lived.
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