A very confused heron is currently suing Mother Nature for breach of contract regarding the promised lakefront view.
🌌 Double Lobed Asteroid Torifune Why is this asteroid a double? Earlier this month the Japanese robotic spacecraft Hayabusa2 shot past asteroid 98943 Torifune and captured pictures. Although previous observations from distant Earth indicated that Torifune was oblong, Hayabusa2 found that…
Evolution finally produced walking fish, but sadly they arrived with mandatory compliance labeling attached.
He looks like he's about to explain exactly why those important documents had to be shredded.
🌌 Galaxy NGC 474: Shells and Star Streams What's happening to galaxy NGC 474? The multiple layers of emission appear strangely complex given the relatively featureless appearance of the elliptical galaxy in less deep images. The cause of the shells is a topic of research, but they are possibly…
My ancestors herded livestock across rugged European terrain and now I'm just here to judge your cable management.
Yes I know I look like I'm about to deliver a soliloquy about the human condition but really I just want to know if that's ham in your sandwich.
My dog's entire contribution to organizing the garage was positioning himself strategically near his emergency snack reserves.
These highly trained security professionals have decided that napping on each other is now their primary job responsibility.
🌌 Messier 24: Sagittarius Star Cloud Unlike most entries in Charles Messier's famous catalog of deep sky objects, M24 is not a bright galaxy, star cluster, or nebula. It's a gap in nearby, obscuring interstellar dust clouds that allows a view of the distant stars in the Sagittarius spiral arm of…
When the spiral cone species finally evolved enough to book conference rooms they really went all out on the color-coded name tags.
The local squirrels have called an emergency meeting to figure out why the humans needed a industrial smoker and a windbreak just to sleep outside.
🌌 Western Moon, Eastern Sea The Mare Orientale, Latin for Eastern Sea, is one of the most striking large scale lunar features. The youngest of the large lunar impact basins it's very difficult to see from an earthbound perspective. Still, captured on July 7 during a period of favorable tilt, or…
When your pollination shift ends in three minutes but you're running on fumes and maximum overdrive.
🌌 The Red Glow of the Cosmic Bat Nebula This Cosmic Bat wishes you a happy Summerween! This mid-year celebration of Halloween transcends hemispheres, even though summer in the Northern hemisphere is winter in the South. Contrary to its eery aura, the Cosmic Bat Nebula (LDN 43), not to be confused…
🌌 NGC 6188: Dragons of Ara Where can you find dragons fighting in the night sky? In the southern constellation of the Altar: Ara. The dragons are, of course, actually made of suggestively shaped gas and dust. The celestial home of the mythological battling beasts is cataloged as NGC 6188 and…
🌌 Dueling Bands over the Atacama Desert What are these two bands in the sky? The more commonly seen band is on the left and is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun orbits in the disk of this spiral galaxy so that from inside, it appears as a band of comparable brightness all the…
🌌 Saturn's Iapetus: Painted Moon What has happened to Saturn's moon Iapetus? Vast sections of this strange world are dark as coal, while others are as bright as snow. To help better understand this unusually tinted moon, in 2007 NASA directed the robotic Cassini spacecraft then orbiting Saturn…
🌌 Pathfinder on Mars On July 4th, 1997, using its own array of fireworks, a parachute, and a cocoon of airbags, the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft bounced like a giant beach ball at least 15 times before it came to rest on the surface of Mars at 10:07 AM Pacific Daylight Time. After its then novel…
🌌 Three Galaxies in Pavo Some 190 million light-years away, far beyond the bright stars and nebulae of the Milky Way, these three galaxies are drawn together by gravity in a mesmerizing cosmic dance. Clearly distorted by galactic-scale gravitational interactions, large spiral galaxies NGC6769 and…
🌌 The Cotton Candy Clouds of Rho Ophiuchi Although they look like cotton candy, you cannot eat these clouds! Taken in Cádiz, Spain, today's image features the Rho Ophiuchi complex, a rich tapestry of young and old astronomical phenomena. This colorful cloud complex is a nearby star-forming region…
🌌 Unusually Smooth Sections of Asteroid Itokawa Why are parts of this asteroid's surface so smooth? The answer seems likely to do with the dynamics of an asteroid that is a loose pile of rubble rather than a solid rock. The unusual asteroid Itokawa was visited by the Japanese spacecraft…
🌌 M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind Why is the Cigar Galaxy billowing red smoke? M82, as this starburst galaxy is also known, was stirred up by a recent pass near large spiral galaxy M81. This doesn't fully explain the source of the red-glowing outwardly expanding gas and dust, however. …
🌌 Milky Way Urban Style In a cosmic vista you can never see, the Milky Way arcs through the night above Seoul, South Korea. Remarkably, this urban night skyscape reveals our galaxy's faintly luminous central region and dark obscuring dust clouds in spite of the brilliant city lights. To overcome…
🌌 Anticrepuscular Rays over Sicily The Sun has just set... in the opposite side of the sky. Pictured here are anticrepuscular rays apparently converging in the east in this image of the limestone plateau in the heart of the Hyblaean Mountains of southeastern Sicily, in Italy. How were these…
🌌 Starry Night II Does this scene look familiar? It is a modern recreation of the famous painting Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. Both the image and the painting depict a tall tree on the left, a crescent moon on the upper right, the planet Venus just to the right of the tree, a foreground…
🌌 Longmore 8: The Hamster Wheel Nebula How did a hamster wheel get into space? The Hamster Wheel Nebula (Longmore 8) was discovered by Andrew Longmore in 1976 as a part of a larger survey of the southern sky. This survey employed several improvements in photographic technology, including the use…
🌌 Moons, Rings, Shadows, Clouds: Saturn (Cassini) While cruising around Saturn, be on the lookout for picturesque arrangements of moons, rings, and shadows. One such striking sight occurred in 2005 and was captured by the then Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft. In the featured image, moons Mimas…
🌌 10 Days of Venus and Jupiter Venus and Jupiter may have caught your attention lately. The recent close conjunction of the two brightest planets in recent evening skies has been hard to miss. With Jupiter at the top, starting on May 30 and ending on June 8, their close approach was chronicled…