ESO’s Very Large Telescope celebrates 15 years of success with a new image of the stellar nursery IC 2944. With this new view of a spectacular stellar nursery ESO is celebrating 15 years of the Very Large Telescope — the world’s most advanced optical instrument. This picture reveals thick clumps of dust silhouetted against the [...]

Hubble reveals the full beauty of a bull’s eye pattern of eleven or so concentric rings around the Cat’s Eye Nebula, also known as NGC 6543. In this detailed view from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the so-called Cat’s Eye Nebula looks like the penetrating eye of the disembodied sorcerer Sauron from the film adaptation of [...]

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope captured this new image of Messier 94, also known as NGC 4736, which is located about 17 million light-years away. How many rings do you see in this new image of the galaxy Messier 94, also known as NGC 4736? While at first glance one might see a number of them, [...]

By combining x-ray, optical, and radio data, astronomers get a full picture of the superheated gas swirling around the black hole at the center of 4C+29.30, a black hole that is thought to be about 100 million times more massive than our Sun. This composite image of a galaxy illustrates how the intense gravity of [...]

This new Hubble images shows galaxy cluster Abell S1077 and is based in part on data spotted by Nick Rose in the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures image processing competition. Bright arcs are smeared around the heart of galaxy cluster Abell S1077 in this image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble space telescope. The arcs are stretched images [...]

In this new image, the APEX telescope reveals interstellar dust in the cosmic clouds of the Orion constellation. This dramatic new image of cosmic clouds in the constellation of Orion reveals what seems to be a fiery ribbon in the sky. This orange glow represents faint light coming from grains of cold interstellar dust, at [...]

This new image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows galaxy 2MASX J05210136-2521450. When we look into the distant cosmos, the great majority of the objects we see are galaxies: immense gatherings of stars, planets, gas, dust, and dark matter, showing up in all kind of shapes. This Hubble picture registers several, but the galaxy cataloged [...]

ESA’s Mars Express has captured new images of a region on Mars known as Sulci Gordii, which lies about 200 km east of Olympus Mons. Giant landslides, lava flows and tectonic forces are behind this dynamic scene captured recently by ESA’s Mars Express of a region scarred by the Solar System’s largest volcano, Olympus Mons. [...]

A new image from ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile shows NGC 6559, a star formation region located roughly 5,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Sagittarius. The Danish 1.54-meter telescope located at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile has captured a striking image of NGC 6559, an object that showcases the anarchy that [...]

Launched roughly four years ago, the Herschel space telescope has run out of liquid coolant and has stopped making observations. Pasadena, California — The Herschel observatory, a European space telescope for which NASA helped build instruments and process data, has stopped making observations after running out of liquid coolant as expected. The European Space Agency [...]

Taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, this NASA image of the day shows the spinning vortex of Saturn’s north polar storm. The spinning vortex of Saturn’s north polar storm resembles a deep red rose of giant proportions surrounded by green foliage in this false-color image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Measurements have sized the eye at a [...]

This Hubble image shows the young star PV Cep, which is located in the northern constellation of Cepheus at a distance of over 1600 light-years from Earth. The Universe is rarely static, although the timescales involved can be very long. Since modern astronomical observations began we have been observing the birthplaces of new stars and [...]