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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

When the sun sets on September 7, the Full Moon will rise. And on that date denizens around much of our fair planet, including parts of Antarctica, Australia, Asia, Europe, and Africa can witness a total lunar eclipse, with the Moon completely immersed in Earth's shadow. As the bright Full Moon first enters Earth's shadow it will darken, finally taking on a reddish hue during the total eclipse phase. In fact, the color of the Moon during a total lunar eclipse is due to reddened light from sunrises and sunsets around planet Earth. The reddened sunlight is scattered by a dense atmosphere into the planet's otherwise dark central shadow. When the sun set on August 22, this telephoto snapshot of red skies, blue sea, and the Mangiabarche Lighthouse was captured from Sant'Antioco, Sardinia, Italy.

Photo by When the sun sets on September 7

A Formula One car Cooper T53, built in 1961 by the by British motorsport team Cooper for sales. The picture was taken in 2023, during a historic race at Donington Park, England.

Julian Herzog (Website), CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Also known as NGC 104, 47 Tucanae is a jewel of the southern sky. Not a star but a dense cluster of stars, it roams the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy along with some 200 other globular star clusters. The second brightest globular cluster (after Omega Centauri) as seen from planet Earth, 47 Tuc lies about 13,000 light-years away. It can be spotted with the naked eye close on the sky to the Small Magellanic Cloud in the constellation of the Toucan. The dense cluster is made up of hundreds of thousands of stars in a volume only about 120 light-years across. Red giant stars on the outskirts of the cluster are easy to pick out as yellowish stars in this sharp telescopic portrait. Tightly packed globular star cluster 47 Tuc is also home to a star with the closest known orbit around a black hole.

Photo by Carlos Taylor

Kalahari lion (Panthera leo) male cub, four months old, in the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, South Africa Shortly after feeding on eland with the rest of the family.

Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

Magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is viewed edge-on from planet Earth. Also known as the Needle Galaxy for its narrow profile, bright NGC 4565 is a stop on many telescopic tours of the northern sky, in the faint but well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. This sharp, colorful image reveals the galaxy's boxy, bulging central core cut by obscuring dust lanes that lace NGC 4565's thin galactic plane. NGC 4565 lies around 40 million light-years distant while the spiral galaxy itself spans some 100,000 light-years. That's about the size of our own Milky Way. Easily spotted with small telescopes, deep sky enthusiasts consider NGC 4565 to be a prominent celestial masterpiece Messier missed.

Photo by José Rodrigues

Main hall of the Szombierki Heat Power Station in Bytom, Poland.

Marian Naworski, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

How soon do jets form when a supernova gives birth to a neutron star? The Africa Nebula provides clues. This supernova remnant surrounds Circinus X-1, an X-ray emitting neutron star and the companion star it orbits. The image, from the ThunderKAT collaboration on the MeerKAT radio telescope situated in South Africa, shows the bright core-and-lobe structure of Cir X-1’s currently active jets inside the nebula. A mere 4600 years old, Cir X-1 could be the "Little Sister" of microquasar SS 433*. However, the newly discovered bubble exiting from a ring-like hole in the upper right of the nebula, along with a ring to the bottom left, demonstrate that other jets previously existed. Computer simulations indicate those jets formed within 100 years of the explosion and lasted up to 1000 years. Surprisingly, to create the observed bubble, the jets need to be more powerful than young neutron stars were previously thought to produce. Open Science: Browse 3,700+ codes in the Astrophysics Source Code Library

Photographic art based on the lights of a Ferris wheel on the Herbstsend in Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

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