RSSMix.com Mix ID 1330815: Recent Episodes
None
Utopia on Mars
Expansive Utopia Planitia on Mars is strewn with rocks and boulders in this 1976 image.
Constructed from the Viking 2 lander's color and black and white image data, the scene approximates the appearance of the high northern martian plain to the human eye.
For scale, the prominent rounded rock near center is about 20 centimeters (just under 8 inches) across.
Farther back on the right side of the frame the a dark angular boulder spans about 1.5 meters (5 feet).
Also in view are two trenches dug by the lander's sampler arm, the ejected protective shroud that covered the soil collector head, and one of the lander's dust covered footpads at the lower right.
On May 14, China’s Zhurong Mars rover successfully touchdown on Mars and has returned the first images of` its landing site in Utopia Planitia.
M13: The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules
In 1716, English astronomer
Edmond Halley noted, "This is but a little Patch, but it shews itself to the naked Eye, when the Sky is serene and the Moon absent."
Of course, M13 is now less modestly recognized as the Great Globular Cluster in Hercules, one of the brightest globular star clusters in the northern sky.
Sharp telescopic views like this one reveal the spectacular cluster's hundreds of thousands of stars.
At a distance of 25,000 light-years, the cluster stars crowd into a region 150 light-years in diameter.
Approaching the cluster core upwards of 100 stars could be contained in a cube just 3 light-years on a side.
For comparison, the closest star to the Sun is over 4 light-years away.
The remarkable range of brightness recorded in this image follows stars into the dense cluster core.
Distant background galaxies in the medium-wide field of view include NGC 6207 at the lower right.
The Jellyfish and Mars
Normally faint and elusive, the Jellyfish Nebula is caught in this alluring scene.
In the telescopic field of view two bright yellowish stars, Mu and Eta Geminorum, stand just below and above the Jellyfish Nebula at the left.
Cool red giants, they lie at the foot of the celestial twin.
The Jellyfish Nebula itself floats below and left of center, a bright arcing ridge of emission with dangling tentacles.
In fact, the cosmic jellyfish is part of bubble-shaped supernova remnant IC 443, the expanding debris cloud from a massive star that exploded.
Light from that explosion first reached planet Earth over 30,000 years ago.
Like its cousin in astrophysical waters the Crab Nebula supernova remnant, the Jellyfish Nebula is known to harbor a neutron star, the remnant of the collapsed stellar core.
Composed on April 30, this telescopic snapshot also captures Mars.
Now wandering through early evening skies, the Red Planet also shines with a yellowish glow on the right hand side of the field of view.
Of course, the Jellyfish Nebula is about 5,000 light-years away, while Mars is currently almost 18 light-minutes from Earth.
Jets from the Necklace Nebula What celestial body wears the Necklace Nebula?
First, analyses indicate that the Necklace is a planetary nebula, a gas cloud emitted by a star toward the end of its life.
Also, what appears to be diamonds in the Necklace are actually bright knots of glowing gas.
In the center of the Necklace Nebula are likely two stars orbiting so close together that they share a common atmosphere and appear as one in the featured image by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The red-glowing gas clouds on the upper left and lower right are the results of jets from the center.
Exactly when and how the bright jets formed remains a topic of research.
The Necklace Nebula is only about 5,000 years old, spans about 5 light years, and can best be found with a large telescope toward the direction of the constellation of the Arrow (Sagitta).
NGC 4565: Galaxy on Edge Is our Milky Way Galaxy this thin?
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 spiral galaxy's boxy, bulging central core cut by obscuring dust lanes that lace NGC 4565's thin galactic plane.
An assortment of other background galaxies is included in the pretty field of view.
Thought similar in shape to our own Milky Way Galaxy, NGC 4565 lies about 40 million light-years distant and spans some 100,000 light-years.
Easily spotted with small telescopes, sky enthusiasts consider NGC 4565 to be a prominent celestial masterpiece Messier missed.
NGC 602 and Beyond The clouds may look like an oyster, and the stars like pearls, but look beyond.
Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy some 200 thousand light-years distant, lies 5 million year young star cluster NGC 602.
Surrounded by natal gas and dust, NGC 602 is featured in this stunning Hubble image of the region.
Fantastic ridges and swept back shapes strongly suggest that energetic radiation and shock waves from NGC 602's massive young stars have eroded the dusty material and triggered a progression of star formation moving away from the cluster's center.
At the estimated distance of the Small Magellanic Cloud, the featured picture spans about 200 light-years, but a tantalizing assortment of background galaxies are also visible in this sharp multi-colored view.
The background galaxies are hundreds of millions of light-years or more beyond NGC 602.
The Southern Cliff in the Lagoon
Undulating bright ridges and dusty clouds cross this close-up of the nearby star forming region M8, also known as the Lagoon Nebula.
A sharp, false-color composite of narrow band visible and broad band near-infrared data from the 8-meter Gemini South Telescope, the entire view spans about 20 light-years through a region of the nebula sometimes called the Southern Cliff.
The highly detailed image explores the association of many newborn stars imbedded in the tips of the bright-rimmed clouds and Herbig-Haro objects.
Abundant in star-forming regions, Herbig-Haro objects are produced as powerful jets emitted by young stars in the process of formation heat the surrounding clouds of gas and dust.
The cosmic Lagoon is found some 5,000 light-years away toward the constellation Sagittarius and the center of our Milky Way Galaxy.
(For location and scale, check out this image superimposing the close-up of the Southern Cliff within the larger Lagoon Nebula. The scale image is courtesy R. Barba'.)
M104: The Sombrero Galaxy
A gorgeous spiral galaxy, M104 is famous for its nearly edge-on profile featuring a broad ring of obscuring dust lanes.
Seen in silhouette against an extensive central bulge of stars, the swath of cosmic dust lends a broad brimmed hat-like appearance to the galaxy suggesting a more popular moniker, the Sombrero Galaxy.
This sharp optical view of the well-known galaxy made from ground-based image data was processed to preserve details often lost in overwhelming glare of M104's bright central bulge.
Also known as NGC 4594, the Sombrero galaxy can be seen across the spectrum, and is host to a central supermassive black hole.
About 50,000 light-years across and 28 million light-years away, M104 is one of the largest galaxies at the southern edge of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster.
Still the colorful spiky foreground stars in this field of view lie well within our own Milky Way galaxy.
The Comet, the Whale, and the Hockey Stick
Closest to the Sun on March 1, and closest to planet Earth on April 23, this Comet ATLAS (C/2020 R4) shows a faint greenish coma and short tail in this pretty, telescopic field of view.
Captured at its position on May 5, the comet was within the boundaries of northern constellation Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs), and near the line-of-sight to intriguing background galaxies popularly known as the Whale and the Hockey Stick.
Cetacean in appearance but Milky Way sized, NGC 4631 is a spiral galaxy seen edge-on at the top right, some 25 million light-years away.
NGC 4656/7 sports the bent-stick shape of interacting galaxies below and left of NGC 4631.
In fact, the distortions and mingling trails of gas detected at other wavelengths suggest the cosmic Whale and Hockey Stick have had close encounters with each other in their distant past.
Outbound and only about 7 light-minutes from Earth this Comet ATLAS should revisit the inner solar system in just under 1,000 years.
A Meteor and the Gegenschein Is the night sky darkest in the direction opposite the Sun?
No. In fact, a rarely discernable faint glow known as the gegenschein (German for "counter glow") can be seen 180 degrees around from the Sun in an extremely dark sky.
The gegenschein is sunlight back-scattered off small interplanetary dust particles.
These dust particles are millimeter sized splinters from asteroids and orbit in the ecliptic plane of the planets.
Pictured here from last March is one of the more spectacular pictures of the gegenschein yet taken.
The deep exposure of an extremely dark sky over Teide Observatory in Spain's Canary Islands shows the gegenschein as part of extended zodiacal light.
Notable background objects include a bright meteor (on the left), the Big Dipper (top right), and Polaris (far right).
The meteor nearly points toward Mount Teide, Spain's highest mountain, while the Pyramid solar laboratory is visible on the right.
During the day, a phenomenon like the gegenschein called the glory can be seen in reflecting air or clouds opposite the Sun from an airplane.
Lightning and Orion Beyond Uluru What's happening behind Uluru?
A United Nations World Heritage Site, Uluru is an extraordinary 350-meter high mountain in central Australia that rises sharply from nearly flat surroundings.
Composed of sandstone, Uluru has slowly formed over the past 300 million years as softer rock eroded away.
In the background of the featured image taken in mid-May, a raging thunderstorm is visible.
Far behind both Uluru and the thunderstorm is a star-filled sky highlighted by the constellation of Orion.
The Uluru region has been a home to humans for over 22,000 years.
Local indigenous people have long noted that when the stars that compose the modern constellation of Orion first appear in the night sky, a hot season involving lightning storms will soon be arriving.
Star Clusters M35 and NGC 2158 Clusters of stars can be near or far, young or old, diffuse or compact.
The featured image shows two quite contrasting open star clusters in the same field.
M35, on the lower left, is relatively nearby at 2800 light years distant, relatively young at 150 million years old, and relatively diffuse, with about 2500 stars spread out over a volume 30 light years across.
Bright blue stars frequently distinguish younger open clusters like M35.
Contrastingly, NGC 2158, on the upper right, is four times more distant than M35, over 10 times older, and much more compact.
NGC 2158's bright blue stars have self-destructed, leaving cluster light to be dominated by older and yellower stars.
In general, open star clusters are found in the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, and contain anywhere from 100 to 10,000 stars -- all of which formed at nearly the same time.
Both open clusters M35 and NGC 2158 can be found together with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Twins (Gemini).
Horsehead and Orion Nebulas The dark Horsehead Nebula and the glowing Orion Nebula are contrasting cosmic vistas.
Adrift 1,500 light-years away in one of the night sky's most recognizable constellations, they appear in opposite corners of the above stunning mosaic.
The familiar Horsehead nebula appears as a dark cloud, a small silhouette notched against the long red glow at the lower left.
Alnitak is the easternmost star in Orion's belt and is seen as the brightest star to the left of the Horsehead.
Below Alnitak is the Flame Nebula, with clouds of bright emission and dramatic dark dust lanes.
The magnificent emission region, the Orion Nebula (aka M42), lies at the upper right.
Immediately to its left is a prominent reflection nebula sometimes called the Running Man.
Pervasive tendrils of glowing hydrogen gas are easily traced throughout the region.
Deepscape at Yacoraite
In this evocative night scene a dusty central Milky Way rises over the ancient Andean archaeological site of Yacoraite in northwestern Argentina.
The denizens of planet Earth reaching skyward are the large Argentine saguaro cactus currently native to the arid region.
The unusual yellow-hued reflection nebula above is created by dust scattering starlight around red giant star Antares.
Alpha star of the constellation Scorpius, Antares is over 500 light-years distant.
Next to it bright blue Rho Ophiuchi is embedded in more typical dusty bluish reflection nebulae though.
The deep night skyscape was created from a series of background exposures of the rising stars made while tracking the sky, and a foreground exposure of the landscape made with the camera and lens fixed on the tripod.
In combination they produce the single stunning image and reveal a range of brightness and color that your eye can't quite perceive on its own.
Mercury Redstone 3 Launch
Sixty years ago, near the dawn of the space age, NASA controllers "lit the candle" and sent Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard arcing into space atop a Redstone rocket.
His cramped space capsule was dubbed Freedom 7.
Broadcast live to a global television audience, the historic Mercury-Redstone 3 (MR-3) spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral Florida at 9:34 a.m. Eastern Time on May 5, 1961.
The flight of Freedom 7, the first space flight by an American, followed less than a month after the first human venture into space by Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.
The 15 minute sub-orbital flight achieved an altitude of 116 miles and a maximum speed of 5,134 miles per hour.
As Shepard looked back near the peak of Freedom 7's trajectory, he could see the outlines of the west coast of Florida, Lake Okeechobe in central Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Bahamas.
Shepard would later view planet Earth from a more distant perspective and walk on the Moon as commander of the Apollo 14 mission.
Windblown NGC 3199
NGC 3199 lies about 12,000 light-years away, a glowing cosmic cloud in the nautical southern constellation of Carina.
The nebula is about 75 light-years across in this narrowband, false-color view.
Though the deep image reveals a more or less complete bubble shape, it does look very lopsided with a much brighter edge along the top.
Near the center is a Wolf-Rayet star, a massive, hot, short-lived star that generates an intense stellar wind.
In fact, Wolf-Rayet stars are known to create nebulae with interesting shapes as their powerful winds sweep up surrounding interstellar material.
In this case, the bright edge was thought to indicate a bow shock produced as the star plowed through a uniform medium, like a boat through water.
But measurements have shown the star is not really moving directly toward the bright edge.
So a more likely explanation is that the material surrounding the star is not uniform, but clumped and denser near the bright edge of windblown NGC 3199.
STEVE over Copper Harbor What creates STEVEs?
Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancements (STEVEs) have likely been seen since antiquity, but only in the past five years has it been realized that their colors and shapes make them different from auroras.
Seen as single bright streaks of pink and purple, the origin of STEVEs remain an active topic of research.
STEVEs may be related to subauroral ion drifts (SAIDs), a supersonic river of hot atmospheric ions.
For reasons currently unknown, STEVEs are frequently accompanied by green "picket-fence" auroras.
The featured STEVE image is a combination of foreground and background exposures taken consecutively in mid-March from Copper Harbor, Michigan, USA.
This bright STEVE lasted several minutes, spanned from horizon to horizon, and appeared in between times of normal auroras.
Space Station, Solar Prominences, Sun That's no sunspot.
It's the International Space Station (ISS) caught passing in front of the Sun.
Sunspots, individually, have a dark central umbra, a lighter surrounding penumbra, and no Dragon capsules attached.
By contrast, the ISS is a complex and multi-spired mechanism, one of the largest and most complicated spacecraft ever created by humanity.
Also, sunspots circle the Sun, whereas the ISS orbits the Earth.
Transiting the Sun is not very unusual for the ISS, which orbits the Earth about every 90 minutes, but getting one's location, timing and equipment just right for a great image is rare.
The featured picture combined three images all taken from the same location and at nearly the same time.
One image -- overexposed -- captured the faint prominences seen across the top of the Sun, a second image -- underexposed -- captured the complex texture of the Sun's chromosphere, while the third image -- the hardest to get -- captured the space station as it shot across the Sun in a fraction of a second.
Close inspection of the space station's silhouette even reveals a docked Dragon Crew capsule.
Apollo 11: Earth, Moon, Spaceship After the most famous voyage of modern times, it was time to go home.
After proving that humanity has the ability to go beyond the confines of planet Earth, the first humans to walk on another world -- Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin -- flew the ascent stage of their Lunar Module back to meet Michael Collins in the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module.
Pictured here on 1969 July 21 and recently digitally restored, the ascending spaceship was captured by Collins making its approach, with the Moon below, and Earth far in the distance.
The smooth, dark area on the lunar surface is Mare Smythii located just below the equator on the extreme eastern edge of the Moon's near side.
It is said of this iconic image that every person but one was in front of the camera.
Clouds of the Carina Nebula What forms lurk in the mists of the Carina Nebula?
The dark ominous figures are actually molecular clouds, knots of molecular gas and dust so thick they have become opaque.
In comparison, however, these clouds are typically much less dense than Earth's atmosphere.
Featured here is a detailed image of the core of the Carina Nebula, a part where both dark and colorful clouds of gas and dust are particularly prominent.
The image was captured in mid-2016 from Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.
Although the nebula is predominantly composed of hydrogen gas -- here colored green, the image was assigned colors so that light emitted by trace amounts of sulfur and oxygen appear red and blue, respectively.
The entire Carina Nebula, cataloged as NGC 3372, spans over 300 light years and lies about 7,500 light-years away in the constellation of Carina.
Eta Carinae, the most energetic star in the nebula, was one of the brightest stars in the sky in the 1830s, but then faded dramatically.
Perseverance from Ingenuity
Flying at an altitude of 5 meters (just over 16 feet), on April 25 the Ingenuity helicopter snapped this sharp image.
On its second flight above the surface of Mars, its color camera was looking back toward Ingenuity's current base at Wright Brothers Field and Octavia E. Butler Landing marked by the tracks of the Perseverance rover at the top of the frame.
Perseverance itself looks on from the upper left corner about 85 meters away.
Tips of Ingenuity's landing legs just peek over the left and right edges of the camera's field of view.
Its record setting fourth flight completed on April 30, Ingenuity collected images of a potential new landing zone before returning to Wright Brothers Field.
Ingenuity's fifth flight would be one-way though as the Mars aircraft moves on to the new airfield, anticipating a new phase of
operational demonstration flights.
Pink and the Perigee Moon
On April 25 a nearly full moon rose just before sunset.
Welcomed in a clear blue sky and framed by cherry blossoms, its familiar face was captured in this snapshot from Leith, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Known to some as a Pink Moon, April's full lunar phase occurred with the moon near perigee.
That's the closest point in its not-quite-circular orbit around planet Earth, making this Pink Moon one of the closest and brightest full moons of the year.
If you missed it, don't worry.
Your next chance to see a full perigee moon will be on May 26.
Known to some as a Flower Moon, May's full moon will actually be closer to you than April's by about 98 miles (158 kilometers), or about 0.04% the distance from the Earth to the Moon at perigee.
Calculating the most influential scientific equations is no easy task. But these five certainly rank in the top tier.
But not always — so make sure you're relying on official warnings about potential twisters
For healthy and happy space travelers, food scientists must make meals compact, nutritious and long-lasting.
Try out these hands-on citizen science projects. You don’t even have to leave the house.
The beginning of April always generates a slew of research papers from scientists who should know better. Here is this year's round up.
Albert Einstein’s simple yet powerful equation revolutionized physics by connecting the mass of an object with its energy for the first time.
An ancient impactor called Theia hit the Earth to create the moon. New research suggests the rest of that planet may still be inside the Earth.
The story of how the first vertebrates came to walk on land hundreds of millions of years ago and filled the Earth with its many descendants.
A starry sense of wonder can pry apart the fears and doubts that turn so many people away from science.
MiMi Aung, project manager for the Mars Helicopter, offers a peek into the high-frontier culture at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Even if the Ingenuity helicopter fails, it is already a success — an engineering resource for a grand future of flight on other worlds.
From stars made of dark matter to stars literally living inside their partners, these stellar systems are theoretically possible.
Cremation diamonds: Here's how science can give you an afterlife in the form of shiny compressed carbon.
The Event Horizon Telescope’s newest images of M87’s supermassive black hole hint at how its jets are fired far into space.
Ancient people looked up at the night sky and pondered the question of alien life, too.
Scientists say they've detected a new, mysterious layer at the center of our home planet. The discovery could unearth more about Earth's history.
March 14 is Pi Day — and it's much more than an excuse to eat pie. Here's the significance of the number 3.14 and how it originated.