Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
International Space Station: Find the Astronaut1.12.2008
Where's the astronaut? Somewhere in this impressive array of International Space Station (ISS) hardware, astronaut Steve Bowen can be found upgrading and cleaning key parts of Earth's most prominent orbital outpost. Astronaut...
Massive Stars Resolved in the Carina Nebula
30.11.2008
How massive can stars be? Big, hefty stars live short violent lives that can profoundly affect their environments. Isolating a massive star can be problematic, however, since what seems to be a single bright star might actually turn out to be several stars close together.
An Apollo 15 Panorama: Astronaut Exploring
29.11.2008
What would it be like to explore the Moon? NASA's Apollo missions gave humans just this chance in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In particular, the Apollo 15 mission was dedicated to better understanding the surface of the Moon by exploring mountains, valleys, maria, and highlands.
Chilean Skyscape
28.11.2008
Night skies over Chilean mountain top observatories can be dark and clear, with glorious cosmic vistas. In this recent example, the plane of our Milky Way galaxy stretches parallel to the horizon, the galactic center's star clusters, dark dust clouds, and glowing nebulae hovering in the west.
Probably a Planet for Beta Pic
27.11.2008
A mere 50 light-years away, young star Beta Pictoris became one of the most important stars in the sky in the early 1980s. Satellite and ground-based telescopic observations revealed the presence of a surrounding...
Galaxies in the River
26.11.2008
Large galaxies grow by eating small ones. Even our own galaxy practices galactic cannibalism, absorbing small galaxies that get too close and are captured by the Milky Way's gravity. In fact, the practice...
The Horsehead Nebula in Orion
25.11.2008
One of the most identifiable nebulae in the sky, the Horsehead Nebula in Orion, is part of a large, dark, molecular cloud. Also known as Barnard 33, the unusual shape was first discovered on a photographic plate in the late 1800s.
Fireball Over Edmonton
24.11.2008
What if you're driving down the street and an object from space shoots across the sky right in front of you? Such was the case last week for many people in south central Canada.
Radar Indicates Buried Glaciers on Mars
23.11.2008
What created this unusual terrain on Mars? The floors of several mid-latitude craters in Hellas Basin on Mars appear unusually grooved, flat, and shallow. New radar images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter bolster an exciting hypothesis: huge glaciers of buried ice.
In the Vicinity of the Cone Nebula
22.11.2008
Strange shapes and textures can be found in neighborhood of the Cone Nebula. The unusual shapes originate from fine interstellar dust reacting in complex ways with the energetic light and hot gas being expelled by the young stars.
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