Space Photos

Sun, Blocked

Image courtesy NASA

The dark disk of the moon partially eclipses the sun in a new picture, released October 7 by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The orbiting telescope captured the lunar transit as the craft was taking pictures of the star in extreme ultraviolet light.

The moon appears large enough to envelop the sun because—as with solar eclipses seen from Earth's surface—the moon is much closer to the observer, in this case, the Earth-orbiting observatory.

Cosmic Pinwheel

Image courtesy ESA/NASA

In a blending of old and new, images from a camera recently removed from the Hubble Space Telescope were combined with pictures from its replacement camera to create this composite view of the spiral galaxy NGC 3982, released Tuesday.

The pictures, taken between March 2000 and August 2009, come together to reveal colorful details in the star-forming galaxy, which lies 68 million light-years away. The galaxy's dusty arms are lined with young star clusters (blue) and glowing hydrogen clouds (pink) where new stars are being born.

Island Aurora

Photograph by Thilo Bubek

A brilliant green aurora seems to flow like a river in the skies over Tromsø, Norway (map), in a long-exposure picture taken between late Saturday and early Sunday.
Aurorae are created as charged particles, which are constantly streaming from the sun, travel along Earth's magnetic field lines and collide with atoms in the planet's atmosphere. The light shows can be more intense—and can sometimes be seen farther from the Poles—during solar storms.

Herculean Nebula

Image courtesy ESA/NASA

Emerging from the darkness like a deep-sea jellyfish, the planetary nebula NGC 6210 shows off its oddball structure in a new picture from the Hubble Space Telescope. The nebula sits about 6,500 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Hercules.

Planetary nebulae actually have little to do with planets. Instead, the clouds of dust and gas are leftovers from the quiet deaths of sunlike stars. These medium-size stars shed their outer layers as they perish, leaving behind dense cores called white dwarfs, which are surrounded by nebulae of different shapes and sizes.

The new picture of NGC 6210, released October 18, shows the nebula's inner region and central white dwarf in unprecedented detail, according to NASA.

Milky Way Cluster

Image courtesy NASA/ESA/STScI

Dust and gas envelop the Arches star cluster, the densest known gathering of young stars in the Milky Way, as seen in an artist's impression released this week in NASA's Image of the Day gallery.
This view of the cluster is based on infrared data from the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories. Observing via infrared light allows these telescopes to peer through the haze that obscures our galaxy's hub and see objects in the deepest reaches of the Milky Way.

Space Ball

Image courtesy ESA/NASA

Like a disco ball in space, the tightly packed globular cluster NGC 1806 glitters for the cameras in a newly released picture from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
Globular clusters contain tens of thousands of stars that are gravitationally bound into distinct, spherical objects. By comparison, typical galaxies contain ten million to a hundred trillion stars.
This particular cluster lies within the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way.