THIS STAR CLUSTER IS 12 BILLION YEARS OLD Photograph by NASA/ESA [NASA/ESA] – This cluster of stars is known as Messier 15, and is located some 35 000 light-years away in the constellation of Pegasus (The Winged Horse). It is one of the oldest globular clusters known, with an age of around…
Photograph by NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI For a sense of scale, the image above sweeps nearly 405,000 miles (651,784 km) across Saturn and its inner rings. It’s the first image ever taken that shows Saturn, its moons and rings, Venus, Mars and Earth all at once. Unveiled on Tuesday, the natural-color, panoramic mosaic taken by NASA’s Cassini…
IN AWE OF THE AURORA Photograph by NASA NASA ISS023-E-058455 (29 May 2010) – Aurora Australis is featured in this image photographed by an Expedition 23 crew member on the International Space Station. Among the views of Earth afforded crew members aboard the ISS, surely one of the most spectacular is of…
A CANYON OF FIRE ON THE SUN Photograph by NASA/SDO NASA/SDO – A magnetic filament of solar material erupted on the sun in late September, breaking the quiet conditions in a spectacular fashion. The 200,000 mile long filament ripped through the sun’s atmosphere, the corona, leaving behind what looks like a canyon…
THE FIRST UNTETHERED FREE FLIGHT IN SPACE Photograph by NASA In this mind-blowing photograph, taken 12 February 1984, Mission Specialist Bruce McCandless II, is seen further away from the confines and safety of his ship than any previous astronaut had ever been. This ‘space first’ was made possible by the Manned Maneuvering…
ONE GIANT LEAP Photograph by NASA Wallops Flight Facility/Chris Perry Last Friday a frog managed to photobomb a NASA spacecraft launch. Posted earlier this week to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Flickr page, NASA explains: “A still camera on a sound trigger captured this intriguing photo of an airborne frog as NASA’s…
THE ECLIPSE OF VENUS Image Credit: NASA/SDO & the AIA, EVE, and HMI teams Digital Composition by: PETER L. DOVE Selected as NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day on August 20, 2013, is this fascinating digital composition by Peter L. Dove. APOD explains: Usually it is the Earth’s Moon that eclipses the…
A ROSE MADE OF GALAXIES Photograph by NASA/ESA/STScI/AURA In celebration of the 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s deployment into space, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., pointed Hubble’s eye to an especially photogenic group of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. The larger of the spiral galaxies,…
EARTH FROM THE DARK SIDE OF SATURN Photograph by NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute In this rare image taken on July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn’s rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame. The dark side of Saturn, its bright limb, the…
A volcano is an opening, or rupture, in a planet’s surface or crust, which allows hot magma, volcanic ash and gases to escape from the magma chamber below the surface. They are generally found where tectonic plates are diverging or converging. A mid-oceanic ridge, for example the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, has examples of volcanoes caused…
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