Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
Centaurus Galaxy Cluster in X Rays27.03.2002
The Centaurus Cluster is a swarm of hundreds of galaxies a mere 170 million light-years away. Like other immense galaxy clusters, the Centaurus Cluster is filled with gas at temperatures of 10 million degrees or more, making the cluster a luminous source of cosmic x-rays.
Looking Into an Io Volcano
26.03.2002
What would it look like to peer into one of the volcanoes currently active on Jupiter's moon Io? The caldera of Tupan Patera, named after a Brazilian thunder god, reveals itself...
Comet Ikeya Zhang over Tenerife
25.03.2002
Comet Ikeya-Zhang has become bright enough to stand out in the night sky. Discovered February 1, the comet has now just rounded the Sun and has likely attained its peak brightness. The comet appears...
An Unusual Globule in IC 1396
24.03.2002
Is there a monster in IC 1396? Known to some as the Elephant's Trunk Nebula, parts of gas and dust clouds of this star formation region may appear to take on foreboding forms, some nearly human. The only real monster here, however, is a bright young star too far from Earth to hurt us.
The Cats Eye Nebula
23.03.2002
Three thousand light-years away, a dying star throws off shells of glowing gas. This image from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the Cat's Eye Nebula to be one of the most complex planetary nebulae known.
The Water Vapor Channel
22.03.2002
What alien planet's bizarre landscape lurks below these fiery-looking clouds? It's only planet Earth, of course ... as seen on the Water Vapor Channel. Hourly, images like this one (an infrared image shown in false-color) are brought to you by the orbiting Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites' (GOES) multi-channel imagers.
Odyssey Over Mars
21.03.2002
Scroll right and journey for 300 kilometers over Terra Sirenum in the cratered highlands of southern Mars. The infrared view, 32 kilometers wide, was recently recorded by the THEMIS camera on board the orbiting Mars Odyssey spacecraft.
S is for Sun
20.03.2002
Taken yesterday from the SOHO spacecraft, this false-color image shows the active Sun near the March Equinox, the beginning of Fall in the south and Spring in the northern hemisphere. Recorded in a band...
Aurora Over Antarctica
19.03.2002
Looking out from the bottom of the world, strange and spectacular sights are sometimes observed. Such was the case during the long Antarctic night of 1998, as awesome aurora sub-storms were photographed above scientific outposts. Visible in the left foreground of the above photograph is the Martin A.
Breaking Distant Light
18.03.2002
In the distant universe, time appears to run slow. Since time-dilated light appears shifted toward the red end of the spectrum (redshifted), astronomers are able to use cosmological time-slowing to help measure vast distances in the universe.
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