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When it comes to Valentine's day, flowers are kind of boring. Do they smell nice? Yes. But they also reek of unoriginality. Face it, people, the bouquet of roses has been done. More »
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For his time-lapse movie of the South Dakotan night sky, photographer Randy Halverson recruited Battlestar Galactica composer Bear McCreary (who we recently chatted with here) to supply an original soundtrack. The result is Temporal Distortion, a short film that will make you feel like a Cylon sleeper agent staring at the stars. Explains Halverson: More »
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This extreme closeup of Saturn's moon Enceladus is the work of the Cassini orbiter, which snapped this awesome image way back in January 2011. Here, the satellite glows a golden brown as it basks in the light of its planet. More »
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The moon doesn't get a lot of action. Unless humans come along to muck things up, the lunar surface remains pretty much as it has been for hundreds of millions of years. But this rock managed to leave a trail in the regolith as recently as 50 million years ago. How did it manage that? More »
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Remember when the Church got all up in Galileo's grill for challenging the geocentric interpretation of the Universe? Seeing this almost makes you wonder if the Universe is still a little sore about that. More »
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Damn. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what stargazers call a globular cluster — a spherical grouping of gravitationally bound celestial bodies, swirling about deep in the inky blackness of space. [Hi-res available here] More »
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We've looked at the Carina Nebula before, but we've never looked into it. While the nebula is plenty beautiful in regular optical wavelengths, this infrared image allows us to peer behind the thick gas clouds to see the gorgeousness inside. More »
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The fierce ultraviolet radiation given off by the young stars of NGC 3324 has carved this giant cavity in space. And, thanks to our old friend pareidolia, that boundary between different gases looks an awful lot like a person's profile. More »
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Think of all the work that goes into getting a birds-eye view of our home planet. Now imagine how hard it would be to snap a photo that manages to capture our entire galaxy. More »
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The CERES Experiment is a NASA project that measures Earth's incoming and outgoing energy. The picture above is a look at Earth's reflected heat energy, as it would be seen from space. More »
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Last week, NASA unveiled the highest-resolution photograph of Earth ever taken... or, rather, the highest-resolution photograph of half the Earth. More »
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Last month, photographer Alex Cherney photographed aurora australis igniting the Australian night. This breathtaking red aurora was caused by particles from January's solar storms exciting oxygen in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Explains Cherney of the shooting conditions: More »
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Have you ever wondered how breathtaking celestial images like this one came to be? Believe it or not, that isn't how they appear when telescopes like Hubble first lay their eyes on them, and getting them to look the way they do is actually a fairly involved process. More »
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Have you met Ebb and Flow? The twin spacecraft entered lunar orbit last month with aims of uncovering the mystery of the Moon's formation. More »
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One of the weirdest of the solar system's moons is Iapetus. This is a medium-sized (1,471 km (914 miles) satellite of Saturn, orbiting about 3,561,300 km (2,213,000 miles) from the planet. Seen from the surface of Iapetus, Saturn looms about four times larger than a full Moon in Earth's sky. More »
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Most images of nebulas make them look flat, so you aren't able to appreciate the true splendor of what a nebula would really look like if you were to fly toward it through space. But now you can. The Space Telescope Science Institute, which runs the Hubble and Webb telescopes, has been using data gathered by the telescopes to create 3D images of familiar nebulae. And as you can see from these videos, it looks breathtaking. Above, you can see a fly-by of the Helix Nebula, created when gas was blown off as a Sun-sized star collapsed into a white dwarf. This vid also lets you compare the original 2D image with the 3D rendering. More »
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Every cosmic phenomenon deserves its own unique claim to fame, but Abell 2052 deserves better than this. Its gas jerks back and forth like a drink sloshing around in a glass. It's like the cosmic equivalent of a tipsy uncle. More »
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You're all familiar with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, right? If not, drop what you're doing. Go read it. Then come back. More »
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This eerie patch of blackness in the middle of a busy star cluster may look like a rather misshapen black hole, but it's actually something even stranger. It's also quite possibly the loneliest, darkest, coldest place in the entire cosmos. More »
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What's incredible about this stunning photograph isn't just that it captures the path the sun appears to take across the sky from the summer solstice to the winter solstice. It's that it was taken with such a simple device: a pin-hole camera made from a drink can. More »
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Late last Sunday, the Sun unleashed an M9-class solar flare, showering Earth with subatomic particles that gave rise to one of the biggest geomagnetic storms in recent history. The resulting aurorae, which were even brighter than usual in the planet's northernmost latitudes, were an absolute marvel to behold. More »
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Who would ever imagine that sand dunes could look so incredible? In this beautiful image, sand trapped in an impact crater in the Red Planet's Moachis Terra region have been sculpted by the winds of Mars into a vast and variegated landscape. More »
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NASA has just released this mind-blowing photograph Earth, which was captured earlier this month by the Agency's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite, Suomi NPP. More »
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Sure, this is a promotion for a sushi joint, but it's an insanely striking one. On January 1, sushi restaurant Sticky Rice decided to fire a roll into the Earth's atmosphere. Explains the sushinautical engineers, "Six months of planning and testing went into this project as a lot of variables were at play: -60F in space, FAA regulations, overheating or freezing batteries, GPS issues, stabilization, and how to make the damn sushi stay together in high winds." More »
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Astronomical, the latest project by artist Mishka Henner, is an entire scale model of the Sun and the nine traditional planets...and absolutely nothing else. As you can see in the video below, it's one giant reminder of cosmic emptiness. More »
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Last week, a swelling solar storm on the surface of the Sun sent a stream of charged particles hurtling toward Earth, making for beautiful northern lights in the planet's extreme latitudes. But late last night, at 10:59 p.m. EST, the now massive tempest unleashed an eruption that scientists expect will be responsible for Earth's largest solar radiation storm since 2005. More »
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Feast your eyes on one of the most puzzling planetary mysteries our solar system has to offer. In this photograph of Saturn's north pole, captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2009, clouds can be seen encircling the planet at about 77 degrees north latitude. Even at such a high parallel, the massive six-sided jet stream has a diameter more than twice that of Earth's. More »
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This absolutely gorgeous image from the European Southern Observatory reveals a planetary nebula, the short-lived phenomenon between the death of a star and birth of a white dwarf that has nothing to do with planets. More »
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This gorgeous image is the work of the Spitzer Space Telescope, which snapped this infrared photo of the Cygnus-X star forming region in 2009. Every bright blue dot represents a star hotter and more massive than anything we can imagine. More »
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What is this strange astronomical formation? A more fanciful interpretation is that it's a vast cosmic eye, but then its official designation - planetary nebula - isn't much more helpful, considering it's neither a planet nor even really a nebula. More »
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Although largely unknown today, astronomer-artist Lucien Rudaux was the grandfather of all modern space art. During the height of his career in the 1920s and 30s, he produced spacescapes of such accuracy that they still hold up well even today. More »
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This doesn't look much like a galaxy, but it is in fact the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the biggest satellite galaxies of our Milky Way. This awesome infrared image reveals the real look of this galaxy like never before. More »
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Space porn connaisseurs are really spoiled today. Any time, any place, we can enjoy hot planetary action, peek in on writhing solar flares, or catch a glimpse of exotic star-on-star-on-planet relationships. But in the days before taking photos of space was a relatively simple proposition, astronomy buffs had to get their kicks with hand-drawn space porn. More »
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More than 60 moons are known to orbit Saturn, but few of them are as visually striking as Iapetus. Named formally after the Greek mythological Titan, Iapetus is sometimes referred to as the "painted," or "yin-yang" moon, due to puzzling variations in its surface composition. More »
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Right at the center of this image, there's a dim orange dot. Somewhere around that dot, one of the stars in a binary system once went supernova, creating the vast red gaseous remnant you see all around it. More »
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When astronomers talk about blue stars, they're generally talking about hot, young stars known as blue supergiants. But the blue stars you can see in the image up top are stars just like their Sun... except they've mysteriously turned blue. More »
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This galaxy cluster is nicknamed El Gordo, which means "The Fat One" in Spanish. Located seven billion light-years away, it's the biggest cluster ever found at that distance — and it's resounding proof that dark matter is everywhere in the cosmos. More »
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Our Milky Way is just a spiral galaxy, but NGC 1232 here is a grand spiral galaxy, its diameter twice as long as ours. Everything is bigger in NGC 1232, including the giant satellite galaxy warping it out of shape. More »
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The wide angle camera onboard NASA's Cassini orbiter has been capturing incredible shots of Saturn and its various moons for years, and if this photo is any indication, it has no intentions of letting up. More »
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On January 4, NASA shot this amazing composite image of the International Space Station crossing over the face of the Moon from Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. More »
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