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From Earth, the Pinwheel Galaxy looks to us like just a pinprick of light in the Big Dipper. But it's an enormous galaxy that's twice the size of our own. And in this new image of the galaxy from NASA, you can see that the Pinwheel is bursting with supernovae — the purple regions in this image highlight areas of extreme heat, where stars are exploding. What's interesting is that these gigantic explosions are happening both in the center and at the extreme edges of the galaxy's arms.

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Remember that image from a few weeks back that showed Earth with all its water gathered up in a sphere beside it? Well here's that image again, only this time, it also features Jupiter's moon Europa, along with all of its water. Notice anything interesting? More »
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NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been orbiting around Saturn and its various moons since 2004. In that time, it's collected thousands upon thousands of awe-inspiring images of the ringed planet and its satellites. More »
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The Moon passed in front of the Sun yesterday, giving rise to a stunning solar eclipse visible across much of the world. A select few even got a rare glimpse of an annular (aka "ring of fire") eclipse — the first to be visible from the continental U.S. since 1994. More »
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Io keeps the same face toward Jupiter as it orbits the planet. For this reason, Jupiter appears to hang motionless in Io's sky. Just as the Earth's Moon does, Jupiter goes through phases as Io orbits it. Here's a gallery showing the view from a location in the northern hemisphere during the course of a single day. It's the kind of view future colonists might take for granted, but it's still pretty incredible for those of us who've only ever experienced days on Earth. More »
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Imagine the Earth in your mind's eye. Now round up all the water on the planet into a sphere (we're talking oceans, icecaps, atmosphere, everything — even the water bound up in you and me). How big do you think that sphere would be compared to the Earth? More »
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NASA just released a promotional video featuring some absolutely gorgeous space imagery. You should watch it. Right now. More »
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THE SUPERMOON IS UPON US! The biggest full Moon of the year will be lighting up the night sky Saturday night. Find out what makes this Moon different, and what, if anything, you need to look out for. (Werewolves? Tidal waves?? YOU CAN NEVER BE TOO CAREFUL, PEOPLE.) More »
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One of the best ways to learn about a planet's history is to examine its geology, so one of the things scientists look for when sending rovers to Mars is areas on the planet's surface that allow access to multiple layers of diverse and interesting rock types. More »
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Now this is something you don't see every day: actual video footage of a binary star system exploding into space. More »
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Just like when storm clouds are swept away to let the Sun shine through, the dark molecular clouds that once engulfed the Carina Nebula are now evaporating, with these little brown blobs the last remnants of once mighty cosmic formations. More »
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It's only fitting that one of the most breathtaking photographs of this weekend's Lyrid meteor shower would be captured from the rim of Oregon's Crater Lake. More »
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Trust us. Stop what you're doing, set aside two minutes of your time, full-screen this bad boy and just watch. Listen. Think about the fact that the "video" you see here was, in fact, carefully pieced together from thousands of individual photographs captured during NASA's Cassini and Voyager missions. Let the carefully selected mix of imagery, old and new, invade your retinas. Just watch. More »
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Greek photographer Chris Kotsiopoulos recently decided to try visualizing a full day in a single photograph. What he ended up with was the incredible, 360°, time-spanning panorama pictured here. More »
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On April 24, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was lifted into low Earth orbit and promptly turned its attention to the depths of space. Today, over 10,000 publications and almost 22 years later, Hubble continues to change the way we see and understand our Universe with images that are truly awesome in every sense of the word. More »
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Earlier this afternoon, magnetic fields on the Sun's northeastern limb exploded in an arcing jet of roiling plasma, producing what is hands down one of the most spectacular solar explosions we've seen in years. More »
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When your constellation is actually named after a unicorn, there are certain expectations of beauty and grandeur you've just got to live up to. And this particular star-forming region inside the constellation Monoceros most definitely delivers on that promise. More »
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Outside of Earth, we've seen auroras on Jupiter and Saturn, but never on Uranus. Now, for the first time, the Hubble Space Telescope has photographed two auroral storms, each as large as the Earth. More »
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If Saturn was a star, it might well be Fomalhaut. Much like our neighboring gas giant, this star is surrounded by a gigantic ring of dust. The disc gets its sharp, ring-like structure from two planets, one on either side. More »
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If you've ever heard someone talk about the Dark Side of the Moon, there's a decent chance they were actually referring to its far side — i.e. the face of the Moon that is permanently pointed away from Earth. If this was the case, they were actually using the term "dark side" incorrectly; the far side of our Moon actually receives just as much light as the side facing Earth. More »
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This is globular cluster M53, one of the galaxy's densest star clusters. It packs thousands of stars into a space about 220 light-years across. It's hard even to imagine the eternally sparkling light show of a night sky you'd see inside M53. More »
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If you're looking for a reminder of how impossibly huge Jupiter is, just take a gander at this image from Cassini. That tiny satellite in front is Io...which is almost the same size and relative distance as our own Moon. More »
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We've seen so many simulated spaceship-to-space station docking in movies and on television, but it's rare to see such a lovely photo of a real-life docking. This is the European Space Agency's ATV-3, just as it's about to dock to the International Space Station. More »
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Remember a few weeks ago when astronomers spotted that "ghostly snake" of a twister creeping its way across the face of Mars? Well, the windstorm featured up top makes that other storm look like an adorable little dust-up. More »
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When the first component of the International Space Station was launched in 1998, it was the beginning of something incredible. The ISS is humanity's castle in the sky. The largest spacecraft ever built, it is a multipurpose facility that is as well-suited for scientific research as it is for education and outreach, and is one of the most brilliant examples of international scientific collaboration in human history. More »
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The stars you see above represent just one tiny selection from an absolutely gargantuan new image of the Milky Way's galactic plane. Combining thousands of images taken over the last two years, it's the ultimate landscape of the night sky. More »
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The Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a spectacular rotation of material in a solar prominence, which created a massive tornado-like feature on the Sun, five times bigger than the Earth. "This is perhaps the first time that such a huge solar tornado is filmed by an imager," said Dr. Xing Li of Aberystwyth University, presenting his team's work at the National Astronomy Meeting this week in the UK. "The superb spatial and temporal resolution of SDO allows us to observe the solar atmosphere in great detail." More »
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Until NASA's spacecraft MESSENGER took up orbit around Mercury last year, the surface of the solar system's innermost planet was a great mystery. Now we've gotten a good look — and we have no idea what we're looking at. More »
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For close to two weeks now, NASA has been waiting for just the right moment to launch its Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (aka ATREX), a mission that will help us better understand the mysterious, high-altitude jet streams located at the edges of Earth's atmosphere. Early this morning, that moment finally came — and hot damn, was it cool looking. More »
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You're looking at a stunning example of something astronomers and stargazers called "Earthshine." Known by some as "the old Moon in the new Moon's arms," Earthshine is a phenomenon first formally described by Leonardo da Vinci some 500 years ago. More »
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Galaxy M82 isn't just having kind of a blustery day — thanks to a recent near-collision with another galaxy, all its massive stars and supernovas are combining to create a massive galaxy-wide superwind. The result is that huge haze of red gas. More »
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Mars watchers have a bit of a mystery on their hands. An astronomy buff captured this photo of the red planet, with what looks like a growth emerging from the sphere. So is it a towering cloud? Or just a trick of the light? More »
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Holy crap. This, everybody, is a Moonrise. The image was captured last week in Cape Sounion, Greece, by photographer Chris Kotsiopoulos, and it's one of the most mindblowing images of the Moon we've seen in in quite some time. Just look at it looming there — it's freaking enormous! More »
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It can be easy to forget, but Mars has clouds very similar to the the ones you find here on Earth. Don't believe me? Here, check out the first photograph ever taken of an overcast Martian sky; or this picture of some stratus clouds, captured about 40 minutes before a Martian sunrise. The thin sheets of cotton-white goodness spread across the image featured up top? Yep, those are clouds. More »
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Feast your eyes on the volcano-covered surface of Io, the innermost of Jupiter's four Galilean moons. More »
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NASA has scheduled an atmospheric light show for the wee hours of Wednesday morning, when the Agency intends to launch five sub-orbital rockets (complete with luminescent chemical tracers) in an experiment designed to test the flow of jet streams on the edge of space. Best of all? A good portion of the East Coast is invited to watch. Find out when and where to look. More »
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The best place to watch the stars isn't on Earth, but just outside, where the atmosphere doesn't get in the way of the view. Photographer Alex Rivest spliced together images taken from the International Space Station, enhancing the natural brilliance of the lights and giving us a peek at how astronauts see the stars. More »
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Earth and space combine to create a striking image from photographer Bret Webster. The Milky Way almost looks as though it's come crashing through our atmosphere in a fury of thunder and lightning.

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After fourteen years of preparation and three years of collecting data, we now have an atlas of the entire infrared sky. This image is just the capstone for a cosmic map that contains 18000 images and 560 million different objects. More »
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You're looking at a picture of Active Region 1429 — that's the decidedly dull name that NOAA has given the sunspot region behind some of the most wicked solar flares and coronal mass ejections astronomers have seen in close to decade. More »
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