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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
A Flight of Helios
24.07.2011
An example of solar-powered flight, NASA's Helios aircraft flew almost one hundred years after the Wright brothers' historic flight on December 17, 1903. Pictured here at 3,000 meters in in skies northwest of Kauai, Hawaii, USA in August 2001, the remotely piloted Helios is traveling at about 40 kilometers per hour.
NGC 2403 in Camelopardalis
23.07.2011
Magnificent island universe NGC 2403 stands within the boundaries of the long-necked constellation Camelopardalis. Some 10 million light-years distant and about 50,000 light-years across, the spiral galaxy also seems to have more than its fair share of giant star forming HII regions, marked by the telltale reddish glow of atomic hydrogen gas.
Pluto s P4
22.07.2011
Nix and Hydra were first introduced to human eyes in Hubble Space Telescope images from May 2005, as Pluto's second and third known moons. Now Hubble images have revealed a fourth satellite for the icy, dwarf planet. Provisionally designated P4, it completes an orbit of Pluto in about 31 days.
Atlantis Farewell from Parkes
21.07.2011
The Parkes 64 meter radio telescope is known for its contribution to human spaceflight, famously supplying television images from the Moon to denizens of planet Earth during Apollo 11. The enormous, steerable, single dish looms in the foreground of this early evening skyscape.
Noctilucent Clouds Over Edmonton
20.07.2011
Sometimes it's night on the ground but day in the air. As the Earth rotates to eclipse the Sun, sunset rises up from the ground. Therefore, at sunset on the ground, sunlight still shines on clouds above.
Vesta Vista
19.07.2011
What does the surface of asteroid Vesta look like? The brightest asteroid in the Solar System and the object which takes up about 10 percent of the entire mass of the main asteroid belt had never been seen up close before.
A Busy Space Walk at the Space Station
18.07.2011
What's that astronaut doing? Unloading a space shuttle -- for the last time. After the space shuttle Atlantis docked with the Mike Fossum underwent a long spacewalk that included carrying a Robotics Refueling Mission (RRM) payload from Atlantis' cargo bay to a platform used by the space station's famous robot DEXTRE.
Lewins Challenge: 360 Degree Star Trails
17.07.2011
You could be the first person ever to take a real single-exposure image like this. The above image from Vienna, Austria is not real in the sense that the 360 degree star trails in the sky appear only because of a digital trick.
Starry Night over Dubai
16.07.2011
A starry night over the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates is really not so starry. In fact, the Moon is the only celestial beacon to come close to competing with city lights in this night skyscape, a situation all too familiar to urban skygazers.
NGC 3314: When Galaxies Overlap
15.07.2011
NGC 3314 is actually two large spiral galaxies which just happen to almost exactly line up. The foreground spiral is viewed nearly face-on, its pinwheel shape defined by young bright star clusters. But against the glow of the background galaxy, dark swirling lanes of interstellar dust appear to dominate the face-on spiral's structure.
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