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Sun Storm: A Coronal Mass Ejection
What’s happening to our Sun? Another Coronal Mass Ejection (CME)! The Sun-orbiting SOHO spacecraft has imaged many erupting filaments lifting off the active solar surface and blasting enormous bubbles...
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A Colorful Solar Corona over the Himalayas
What are those colorful rings around the Sun? A corona visible only to Earth observers in the right place at the right time. Rings like this will sometimes appear when the Sun or Moon is seen through...
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The California Nebula
What’s California doing in space? Drifting through the Orion Arm of the spiral Milky Way Galaxy, this cosmic cloud by chance echoes the outline of California on the west coast of the United States....
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Reflections on the 1970s
The 1970s are sometimes ignored by astronomers, like this beautiful grouping of reflection nebulae in Orion – NGC 1977, NGC 1975, and NGC 1973 – usually overlooked in favor of the substantial glow...
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Infrared Portrait of the Large Magellanic Cloud
Cosmic dust clouds ripple across this infrared portrait of our Milky Way’s satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. In fact, the remarkable composite image from the Herschel Space Observatory and...
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Wright Mons in Color
Informally named Wright Mons, a broad mountain about 150 kilometers across and 4 kilometers high with a wide, deep summit depression is featured in this inset image captured during the New Horizons...
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The View Toward M106
A big, bright, beautiful spiral, Messier 106 is at the center of this galaxy filled cosmic vista. The two degree wide telescopic field of view looks toward the well-trained constellation Canes...
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The Galactic Center in Infrared
The center of our Galaxy is a busy place. In visible light, much of the Galactic Center is obscured by opaque dust. In infrared light, however, dust glows more and obscures less, allowing nearly one...
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Stainless Steel Murrine Mold
Stainless Steel Murrine Mold with kiln paper cut to fit. Traditional ways to create soft glass murrine can be a skill that takes years to perfect. It involves a steady hand. Perfecting the “painting”...
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Tarantula (Spider) Murrine
Various sizes available 8mm (smallest), dime sizes, nickel sizes and quarter sizes. These don’t really fit into the shopping cart so are PayPal only. I have the small ones 8mm (approx.) – $1 Dime size...
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Yutu on a Little Planet
Tracks lead to a small robot perched near the top of this bright little planet. Of course, the planet is really the Moon. The robot is the desk-sized Yutu rover, leaving its looming Chang’e 3 lander...
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A Heart Shaped Lenticular Cloud
Can a cloud love a mountain? Perhaps not, but on a Valentine’s Day like today, one might be prone to seeing heart-shaped symbols where they don’t actually exist. A fleeting pareidolia, the featured...
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White Rock Fingers on Mars
What caused this unusual light rock formation on Mars? Intrigued by the possibility that they could be salt deposits left over as an ancient lakebed dried-up, detailed studies of these fingers now...
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Star Forming Region S106
Massive star IRS 4 is beginning to spread its wings. Born only about 100,000 years ago, material streaming out from this newborn star has formed the nebula dubbed Sharpless 2-106 Nebula (S106),...
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Milky Way over the Pinnacles in Australia
What strange world is this? Earth. In the foreground of the featured image are the Pinnacles, unusual rock spires in Nambung National Park in Western Australia. Made of ancient sea shells (limestone),...
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Hitomi Launches
On February 17 at 5:45pm JST this H-IIA rocket blasted skyward from JAXA’s Tanegashima Space Center located off the southern coast of Japan, planet Earth. Onboard was the ASTRO-H X-ray astronomy...
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NGC 2403 in Camelopardalis
Magnificent island universe NGC 2403 stands within the boundaries of the long-necked constellation Camelopardalis. Some 10 million light-years distant and about 50,000 light-years across, the spiral...
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Where Your Shadow Has Company
Want to take a relaxing interstellar vacation? Consider visiting Kepler-16b, a world in a binary star system. In fact Kepler-16b is the first discovered circumbinary planet. It was detected in a wide...
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M82: Galaxy with a Supergalactic Wind
What’s lighting up the Cigar Galaxy? M82, as this irregular galaxy is also known, was stirred up by a recent pass near large spiral galaxy M81. This doesn’t fully explain the source of the red-glowing...
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A Supernova through Galaxy Dust
Telescopes around the world are tracking a bright supernova that occurred in a nearby dusty galaxy. The powerful stellar explosion was first noted earlier this month. The nearby galaxy is the...
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