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The Eagle Nebula (also known as Messier Object 16, M16 or NGC 6611) is a young
open cluster of stars. The nebula is an active region of
star formation. Light from the bright, hot, young
stars near the centre of the cluster illuminate the clouds of
hydrogen gas and dust still collapsing to form new stars.
A timed exposure of the first
Space Shuttle mission, STS-1. The shuttle
Columbia stands on launch pad A at
Kennedy Space Center, the night before launch. The objectives of the maiden flight were to check out the overall Shuttle system, accomplish a safe ascent into
orbit and to return to Earth for a safe landing.
False-colorMars Reconnaissance Orbiter image of a side of the Chasma Boreale, a canyon in the polar
ice cap of the Planum Boreum (north pole of
Mars). Light browns are layers of surface dust, greys and blues are layers of
water and
carbon dioxide ice. Regular geometric cracking is indicative of higher concentrations of water ice.
The Planum Boreum's permanent ice cap has a maximum depth of 3 km (1.9 mi). It is roughly 1200 km (750 mi) in diameter, an area equivalent to about 1½ times the size of
Texas. The Chasma Boreale is up to 100 km (62.5 mi) wide and features
scarps up to 2 km (1.25 mi) high. For a comparison, the
Grand Canyon is approximately 1.6 km (1 mi) deep in some places and 446 km (279 mi) long but only up to 24 km (15 mi) wide.
This
infrared image shows hundreds of thousands of stars crowded into the swirling core of our spiral Milky Way galaxy. In
visible-light pictures, this region cannot be seen at all because
cosmic dust lying between Earth and the galactic center blocks our view.
An animation of an eruption by the Tvashtar Paterae volcanic region on the innermost of
Jupiter's
Galilean moons,
Io. The
ejecta plume is 330 km (205 mi) high, though only its uppermost half is visible in this image, as its source lies over the moon's limb on its far side. This animation consists of a sequence of five images taken by
NASA's New Horizons probe on March 1, 2007, over the course of eight minutes from 23:50
UTC.
A 360°
panorama taken during the descent from the summit of Husband Hill, one of the
Columbia Hills in
Gusev crater,
Mars. This
stitched image is composed of 405 individual images taken with five different filters on the panoramic camera over the course of five Martian days.
Astronaut
Eugene Cernan makes a short test drive of the lunar rover (officially, Lunar Roving Vehicle or LRV) during the early part of the first
Apollo 17extravehicular activity. The LRV was only used in the last three
Apollo missions, but it performed without any major problems and allowed the astronauts to cover far more ground than in previous missions. All three LRVs were abandoned on the Moon.
A composite image of Olympus Mons on
Mars, the tallest known
volcano and
mountain in the
Solar System. This image was created from black-and-white imagery from the
USGS's Mars Global Digital Image Mosaic and color imagery acquired from the 1978 visit of
Viking 1.
An
animated view of Voyager I's approach to Jupiter. One
frame of this image was taken each Jupiter day (approximately 10 hours) between January 6 and February 9, 1979, as the
space probe flew from 58 million to 31 million kilometers from Jupiter during that time. The small, round, dark spots appearing in some frames are the shadows cast by the
moons passing between Jupiter and the
Sun, while the small, white flashes around the planet, are the moons themselves.
A
radar image of the surface of Venus, centered at 180 degrees east longitude. This composite image was created from mapping by the Magellan probe, supplemented by data gathered by the Pioneer orbiter, with simulated hues based on color images recorded by Venera 13 and 14. No
probe has been able to survive more than a few hours on
Venus's surface, which is completely obscured by clouds, because the
atmospheric pressure is some 90 times that of the Earth's, and its surface temperature is around 450 °C (842 °F).
An
animated image showing the apparent retrograde motion of Mars in 2003 as seen from
Earth. All the true planets appear to periodically switch direction as they cross the sky. Because Earth completes its
orbit in a shorter period of time than the planets outside its orbit, we periodically overtake them, like a faster car on a multi-lane highway. When this occurs, the planet will first appear to stop its eastward drift, and then drift back toward the west. Then, as Earth swings past the planet in its orbit, it appears to resume its normal motion west to east.
Pale Blue Dot is the name given to this 1990 photo of
Earth taken from Voyager 1 when its vantage point reached the edge of the
Solar System, a distance of roughly 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometres). Earth can be seen as a blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right. The light band over Earth is an artifact of sunlight
scattering in the camera's
lens, resulting from the small angle between Earth and the
Sun.
Carl Sagan came up with the idea of turning the spacecraft around to take a composite image of the Solar System. Six years later, he reflected, "All of human history has happened on that tiny pixel, which is our only home."
An
animation of the phases of the Moon. As the Moon revolves around the
Earth, the
Sun lights the Moon from a different side, creating the different phases. In the image, the Moon appears to get bigger as well as "
wobble" slightly.
Tidal locking synchronizes the Moon's
rotation period on its axis to match its
orbital period around the earth. These two periods nearly cancel each other out, except that the Moon's orbit is
elliptical. This causes its orbital motion to speed up when
closer to the Earth, and slow down when farther away, causing the Moon's
apparent diameter to change, as well as the wobbling motion observed.
A laser shoots towards the centre of the
Milky Way from the
Very Large Telescope facility in Chile, to provide a
laser guide star, a reference point in the sky for the telescope's adaptive optics (AO) system. AO technology improves the performance of
optical systems by reducing the effect of
atmospheric distortion. AO was first envisioned by
Horace W. Babcock in 1953, but did not come into common usage until advances in computer technology during the 1990s made the technique practical.
The Andromeda Galaxy is a spiral galaxy approximately 2.5 million light-years away. The image, created using a
hydrogen-alpha filter, also shows
Messier objects32 and
110, as well as
NGC 206 and the star
Nu Andromedae. On December 15, 1612, German astronomer
Simon Marius became the first person to describe the galaxy using a telescope.
Uranus is the seventh planet from the
Sun and the fourth most massive in the
Solar System. In this photograph from 1986 the planet appears almost featureless, but recent terrestrial observations have found seasonal changes to be occurring.
A solar flare, a sudden flash of brightness observed over the
Sun's surface or the solar limb which is interpreted as a large energy release, recorded on August 31, 2012. Such flares are often, but not always, followed by a colossal
coronal mass ejection; in this instance, the ejection traveled at over 900 miles (1,400 km) per second.
The Day the Earth Smiled refers to the date July 19, 2013, on which the Cassini spacecraft turned to image
Saturn, its entire
ring system, and the Earth from a position where Saturn eclipsed the Sun. Cassini imaging team leader and planetary scientist
Carolyn Porco called for all the world's people to reflect on humanity's place in the cosmos, to marvel at life on Earth, and to look up and smile in celebration. The final mosaic, shown here, was released four months later and includes planets Earth, Mars, and Venus, and a host of
Saturnian moons.
A diagram of Jupiter showing a model of the planet's interior, with a rocky
core overlaid by a deep layer of liquid
metallic hydrogen and an outer layer predominantly of
molecular hydrogen. Jupiter's true interior composition is uncertain. For instance, the core may have shrunk as convection currents of hot liquid metallic hydrogen mixed with the molten core and carried its contents to higher levels in the planetary interior. Furthermore, there is no clear physical boundary between the hydrogen layers—with increasing depth the gas increases smoothly in temperature and density, ultimately becoming liquid.
Photograph:
NASA,
ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team
The Pillars of Creation, a series of
elephant trunks of
interstellar gas and
dust in the
Eagle Nebula, are the subject of a famous
Hubble Space Telescope photograph taken in 1995. They are so named because the depicted gas and dust, while being eroded by the light from nearby stars, are in the process of creating new stars. Shown here is a 2014 rephotograph, which was unveiled in 2015 as part of the telescope's 25th anniversary celebrations.
Realistic-color mosaic of images of
Jupiter's moon Europa taken by NASA's Jupiter orbiter Galileo in 1995 and 1998. This view of the moon's
anti-Jovian hemisphere shows numerous
lineae, linear features created via a
tectonic process in which crustal plates of water ice floating on a
subsurface ocean (kept warm by
tidal flexing) shift in relative position. Reddish regions are areas where the ice has a higher mineral content. The north polar region is at right. (
Geologic features are annotated in
Commons.)
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and is known as the "Red Planet" due to its reddish appearance as seen from Earth. The planet is named after
Mars, the Roman god of war. A
terrestrial planet, Mars has
a thin atmosphere and surface features reminiscent both of the
impact craters of the Moon and the volcanoes, valleys, deserts and
polar ice caps of the Earth. The planet has the highest mountain in the
Solar System,
Olympus Mons, as well as the largest canyon,
Valles Marineris. Mars's
rotation period and seasonal cycles are also similar to those of the Earth. Of all the planets in the Solar System other than Earth, Mars is the most likely to harbour liquid water and perhaps life. There are ongoing investigations assessing Mars's past potential for
habitability, as well as
the possibility of extant life. Future astrobiology missions are planned, including
NASA's
Mars 2020 rover and the
European Space Agency (ESA)'s Rosalind Franklin rover. In November 2016, NASA reported finding a large amount of
underground ice in the
Utopia Planitia region of the planet. The volume of water detected has been estimated to be equivalent to the volume of water in
Lake Superior. Mars has two moons,
Phobos and
Deimos, which are small and irregularly shaped.
This picture is a
true-colour image of Mars, taken from a distance of about 240,000 kilometres (150,000 mi) by the
OSIRIS instrument on ESA's Rosetta spacecraft, during its February 2007 flyby of the planet. The image was generated using OSIRIS's orange (red), green and blue filters.
Neptune is the eighth and farthest known
planet from the
Sun in the
Solar System. In the Solar System, it is the fourth-largest planet by diameter, the third-most-massive planet and the densest
giant planet. Neptune is 17 times the mass of
Earth, slightly more massive than its near-twin
Uranus. Neptune is denser and physically smaller than Uranus because its greater mass causes more gravitational compression of its atmosphere. Neptune orbits the Sun once every 164.8
years at an average distance of 30.1
au (4.5 billion km; 2.8 billion mi). It is named after the
Roman god of the sea and has the
astronomical symbol ♆, a stylised version of the god Neptune's
trident.
This picture of Neptune was taken by
NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989, at a range of 4.4 million miles (7.1 million kilometres) from the planet, approximately four days before closest approach. The photograph shows the
Great Dark Spot, a storm about the size of Earth, in the centre, while the fast-moving bright feature nicknamed the "Scooter" and the
Small Dark Spot can be seen on the western limb. These clouds were seen to persist for as long as the spacecraft's cameras could resolve them.
The Cassini–Huygensspace-research project involved a collaboration between
NASA, the
European Space Agency, and the
Italian Space Agency to send a
probe to study the planet
Saturn and its system, including
its rings and
its natural satellites.
This natural-color mosaic image, combining thirty photographs, was taken by the Cassini orbiter over the course of approximately two hours on 23 July 2008 as it panned its wide-angle camera across Saturn and its ring system as the planet approached
equinox. Six moons are pictured in the panorama, with the largest,
Titan, visible at the bottom left.
NGC 6357 is a
diffuse nebula in the constellation
Scorpius. This composite image of the nebula contains X-ray data from the
Chandra X-ray Observatory and the
ROSAT telescope (purple), infrared data from the
Spitzer Space Telescope (orange), and optical data from the SuperCosmos Sky Survey (blue). Radiation from hot, young stars is energizing the cooler gas in the clouds that surround them. Often known as the Lobster Nebula, the astronomical object has also been termed the Madokami Nebula by fans of the anime Madoka Magica due to its supposed resemblance to the main character. Scientists at the
Midcourse Space Experiment prefer the name War and Peace Nebula, because the bright, western part resembles a dove, while the eastern part looks like a skull in
infrared images.
Ignace-Gaston Pardies (1636–1673) was a French Catholic priest and scientist. His
celestial atlas, entitled Globi coelestis in tabulas planas redacti descriptio, comprised six charts of the night sky and was first published in 1674. The atlas uses a
gnomonic projection so that the plates make up a cube of the
celestial sphere. The constellation figures are drawn from Uranometria, but were carefully reworked and adapted to a broader view of the sky. This is the second plate from a 1693 edition of Pardies's atlas, featuring constellations including
Pegasus and
Andromeda, visible in the
northern sky.
Credit: NASA, ESA, AURA/Caltech, Palomar Observatory
The Pleiades (also known as M45 or the Seven Sisters) is an
open cluster in the constellation of
Taurus. It is among the nearest to the
Earth of all open clusters, probably the best known and certainly the most striking to the
naked eye.
"Earthrise," the first occasion in which humans saw the
Earth seemingly rising above the surface of the
Moon, taken during the Apollo 8 mission on December 24, 1968. This view was seen by the crew at the beginning of its fourth
orbit around the Moon, although the very
first photograph taken was in black-and-white. Note that the Earth is in shadow here. A photo of a
fully lit Earth would not be taken until the
Apollo 17 mission.
The Pioneer plaque, which was included on both Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 unmanned
spacecraft, the first man-made objects to leave the
Solar System. Made from
gold-
anodisedaluminium, the plaque shows the figures of a man and a woman along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft. However, the
mean time for the spacecraft to come within 30
astronomical units of a
star is longer than the current age of
our galaxy.
A
TRACE image of sunspots on the surface, or
photosphere, of the
sun from September
2002, is taken in the far
ultraviolet on a relatively quiet day for solar activity. However, the image still shows a large sunspot group visible as a bright area near the horizon. Although sunspots are relatively cool regions on the surface of the sun, the bright glowing gas flowing around the sunspots have a temperature of over one million °
C (1.8 million °
F). The high
temperatures are thought to be related to the rapidly changing
magnetic field loops that channel solar
plasma.
Mars, the fourth
planet from the
Sun, is named after the
Roman god of war because of its blood
red color. Mars has two small, oddly-shaped moons,
Phobos and
Deimos, named after the sons of the
Greek god
Ares. At some point in the future Phobos will be broken up by
gravitational forces. The atmosphere on Mars is 95%
carbon dioxide. In 2003
methane was also discovered in the atmosphere. Since methane is an unstable gas, this indicates that there must be (or have been within the last few hundred years) a source of the
gas on the planet.
"
The Blue Marble" is a famous photograph of
Earth.
NASA officially credits the image to the entire Apollo 17 crew —
Eugene Cernan,
Ronald Evans and
Jack Schmitt — all of whom took photographic images during the mission. Apollo 17 passed over
Africa during daylight hours and
Antarctica is also illuminated. The photograph was taken approximately five hours after the spacecraft's launch, while en route to the
Moon. Apollo 17, notably, was the last manned lunar mission; no
humans since have been at a range where taking a "whole-Earth" photograph such as "The Blue Marble" would be possible.
A composite photo of the Orion Nebula, the closest region of
star formation to Earth. It is composed of 520 separate images and
NASA calls it "one of the most detailed astronomical images ever produced". The
nebula is located below
Orion's Belt and is visible to the
naked eye at night. It is one of the most scrutinized and photographed objects in the night sky, and is among the most intensely-studied celestial features.
This Supernova remnant of
Kepler'sSupernova (
SN 1604) is made up of the materials left behind by the gigantic explosion of a star. There are two possible routes to this end: either a massive star may cease to generate fusion energy in its core, and collapse inward under the force of its own gravity, or a
white dwarf star may accumulate material from a companion star until it reaches a critical mass and undergoes a similar collapse. In either case, the resulting supernova explosion expels much or all of the stellar material with great force.
The launch of Space ShuttleAtlantis on
STS-98,
February 72001, at sunset. The sun is behind the camera, and the shape of the
plume is cast across the vault of the sky, intersecting the rising full moon. The top portion of the plume is bright because it is illuminated directly by the sun; the lower portions are in the Earth's shadow. After launch, the shuttle must engage in a
pitch and roll program so that the vehicle is below the
external tank and
SRBs, as evidenced in the plume trail. The vehicle climbs in a progressively flattening arc, because achieving low
orbit requires much more horizontal than vertical
acceleration.
The Sombrero Galaxy is a
spiral galaxy in the
Virgo constellation. It was discovered in the late 1700s. It is about 28 million
light years away and is just faint enough to be invisible to the naked eye but easily visible with small telescopes. In our sky, it is about one-fifth the diameter of the
full moon. M104 is moving away from
Earth at about 1,000 kilometers per second.