Magazine Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Meteors have been flowing out from the constellation Gemini. This was expected, as mid-December is the time of the Geminid Meteor Shower. Pictured here, over two dozen meteors were caught in successively added exposures taken over several hours early Saturday morning from a snowy forest in Poland. The fleeting streaks were bright enough to be seen over the din of the nearly full Moon on the upper right. These streaks can all be traced back to a point on the sky called the radiant toward the bright stars Pollux and Castor in the image center. The Geminid meteors started as sand sized bits expelled from asteroid 3200 Phaethon during its elliptical orbit through the inner Solar System. Jigsaw Challenge: Astronomy Puzzle of the Day

Photo by Jakub Kuřák

Jewish cemetery in Dülmen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Awkward and angular looking, Apollo 17's lunar module Challenger was designed for flight in the near vacuum of space. Digitally enhanced and reprocessed, this picture taken from Apollo 17's command module America shows Challenger's ascent stage in lunar orbit. Small reaction control thrusters are at the sides of the moonship with the bell of the ascent rocket engine underneath. The hatch allowing access to the lunar surface is seen at the front, with a round radar antenna at the top. Mission commander Gene Cernan is clearly visible through the triangular window. This spaceship performed gracefully, landing on the Moon and returning the Apollo astronauts to the orbiting command module in December of 1972. So where is Challenger now? Its descent stage remains at the Apollo 17 landing site in the Taurus-Littrow valley. The ascent stage pictured was intentionally crashed nearby after being jettisoned from the command module prior to the astronauts' return to planet Earth.

Overview of the city of Horta, one of the three capitals of the archipelago, during the blue hour from Monte da Guia, Faial Island, Azores, Portugal.

Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

An intriguing pair of interacting galaxies, M51 is the 51st entry in Charles Messier's famous catalog. Perhaps the original spiral nebula, the large galaxy with whirlpool-like spiral structure seen nearly face-on is also cataloged as NGC 5194. Its spiral arms and dust lanes sweep in front of its smaller companion galaxy, NGC 5195. Some 31 million light-years distant, within the boundaries of the well-trained constellation Canes Venatici, M51 looks faint and fuzzy to the eye in direct telescopic views. But this remarkably deep image shows off stunning details of the galaxy pair's striking colors and fainter tidal streams. The image includes extensive narrowband data to highlight a vast reddish cloud of ionized hydrogen gas recently discovered in the M51 system and known to some as the H-alpha cliffs. Foreground dust clouds in the Milky Way and distant background galaxies are captured in the wide-field view. A continuing collaboration of astro-imagers using telescopes on planet Earth assembled over 3 weeks of exposure time to create this evolving portrait of M51. Watch: The 2024 Geminid Meteor Shower

Photo by The Deep Sky Collective

The image above shows a rare, cloud-free view of the remote Elephant Island on December 13, 2020, as captured by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Kasha Patel., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Based on its well-measured orbit, 3200 Phaethon (sounds like FAY-eh-thon) is recognized as the source of the meteoroid stream responsible for the annual Geminid meteor shower. Even though most meteor shower parents are comets, 3200 Phaethon is a known and closely tracked near-Earth asteroid with a 1.4 year orbital period. Rocky and sun-baked, its perihelion or closest approach to the Sun is well within the orbit of innermost planet Mercury. In this telescopic field of view, the asteroid's rapid motion against faint background stars of the heroic constellation Perseus left a short trail during the two minute total exposure time. The (faint) parallel streaks of its meteoric children flashed much more quickly across the scene. The family portrait was recorded near the Geminid meteor shower's very active peak on 2017 December 13. That was just three days before 3200 Phaethon's historic close approach to planet Earth. This year, the night of December 13 should again see the peak of the Geminid meteor shower, but faint meteors will be washed out by the bright light of the nearly full moon. Watch: The 2024 Geminid Meteor Shower

Photo by Mikiya Sato

Saint Mary Basilica seen from the Cloth Hall in Kraków, Poland.

Jar.ciurus, CC BY-SA 3.0 pl, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.