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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
Saturn: Lord of the Rings
14.02.2002
Born on today's date in 1564, Galileo used a telescope to explore the Solar System. In 1610, he became the first to be amazed by Saturn's rings. After nearly 400 years, Saturn's magnificent rings still offer one of the most stunning astronomical sights.
Solar System Portrait
13.02.2002
On another Valentine's Day (February 14, 1990), cruising four billion miles from the Sun, the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back to make this first ever family portrait of our Solar System. The complete portrait is a 60 frame mosaic made from a vantage point 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane.
The Great Nebula in Orion
12.02.2002
Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula's glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1500 light-years away.
Methane Earth
11.02.2002
Can you help in reducing this blanket of methane gas that is warming up our Earth? Recent evidence holds that methane (CH4) is second only to carbon dioxide (CO2) in creating a warming greenhouse effect but is easier to control.
Reflection Nebula M78
10.02.2002
An eerie blue glow and ominous columns of dark dust highlight M78, one of the brightest reflection nebula on the sky. M78 is visible with a small telescope toward the constellation of Orion. The dust not only absorbs light, but also reflects the light of several bright blue stars that formed recently in the nebula.
The Local Interstellar Cloud
9.02.2002
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). The ISM is not uniform, and shows patchiness even near our Sun.
Moon Over Mongolia
8.02.2002
Fighting clouds and the glow of city lights, a young Moon shines over the western horizon of Mongolia's capital, Ulaan-Baatar. The thin sunlit crescent is about 2 days old and strongly over exposed in this image taken on March 10, 1997.
PKS 1127 145: Quasar View
7.02.2002
The quasar known as PKS 1127-145 lies ten billion light-years from our fair planet. A Hubble Space Telescope view in the left panel shows this quasar along with other galaxies as they appear in optical light. The quasar itself is the brightest object in the lower right corner.
Coronal Hole
6.02.2002
This ominous, dark shape sprawling across the face of the active Sun is a coronal hole -- a low density region extending above the surface where the solar magnetic field opens freely into interplanetary space.
The Cosmic Infrared Background
5.02.2002
What cosmic wallpaper is on the sky? The answer depends on the type of light considered, and for some wavelengths, all the cluttering material in the foreground makes it still unknown. Recently, however...
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