Why does this Moon look so unusual? A key reason is its vivid red color. The color is caused by the deflection of blue light by Earth's atmosphere -- the same reason that the daytime sky appears blue.

With spacecraft thrusters at top center, the rugged surface of the Moon lies below the Blue Ghost lander in this space age video frame. The view of the lunar far side was captured by the Firefly Aerospace

Planet Earth hangs in the background of this space age selfie. The snapshot was captured by the IM-2 Nova-C lander Athena, just after stage separation following its February 26 launch to the Moon. A tall

Framed in this single, starry, telescopic field of view are two open star clusters, M35 and NGC 2158. Located within the boundaries of the constellation Gemini, they do appear to be side by side. Its stars

Do you see the ring? If you look very closely at the center of the featured galaxy NGC 6505, a ring becomes evident. It is the gravity of NGC 6505, the nearby (z = 0.042) elliptical galaxy that you can

Can a lava flow extend into the sky? No, but light from the lava flow can. One effect is something quite unusual -- a volcanic light pillar. More typically, light pillars are caused by sunlight and so

Saturn looks slightly different in infrared light. Bands of clouds show great structure, including long stretching storms. Also quite striking in infrared is the unusual hexagonal cloud pattern surrounding

Rima Hyginus is a spectacular fissure, some 220 kilometers long, found near the center of the lunar near side. Easy to spot in telescopic views of the Moon, it stretches top left to bottom right across

The largest photomosaic ever assembled from Hubble Space Telescope image data is a panoramic view of our neighboring spiral Andromeda Galaxy. With 600 overlapping frames assembled from observations made

rmous elliptical galaxy Messier 87 is about 50 million light-years away. Also known as NGC 4486, the giant galaxy holds trillions of stars compared to the mere billions of stars in our large spiral Milky

How do stars and planets form? New clues have been found in the protoplanetary system Herbig-Haro 30 by the James Webb Space Telescope in concert with Hubble and the Earth-bound ALMA. The observations

Seen as a seagull and a duck, these nebulae are not the only cosmic clouds to evoke images of flight. But both are winging their way across this broad celestial landscape, spanning almost 7 degrees across

What's happened to the sky? Last Monday, the photogenic launch plume from a SpaceX rocket launch created quite a spectacle over parts of southern California and Arizona. Looking at times like a giant space

Three suns seem to hug the horizon in this otherworldly winterscape. But the evocative scene was captured during a February 3rd snowmobile exploration of the mountainous region around Abisko National Park,

The Rosette Nebula, NGC 2237, is not the only cosmic cloud of gas and dust to evoke the imagery of flowers, but it is probably the most famous. At the edge of a large molecular cloud in Monoceros some

Riding high in the constellation of Auriga, beautiful, blue VdB 31 is the 31st object in Sidney van den Bergh's 1966 catalog of reflection nebulae. It shares this well-composed celestial still life with

Will the spider ever catch the fly? Not if both are large emission nebulas toward the constellation of the Charioteer (Auriga). The spider-shaped gas cloud in the image center is actually an emission nebula

Is this the largest hummingbird ever? Although it may look like a popular fluttering nectarivore, what is pictured is actually a beautifully detailed and colorful aurora, complete with rays reminiscent

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),

A waxing crescent Moon and a waning crescent Venus are found at opposite corners of this twilight telephoto field of view. The close conjunction of the two brightest celestial beacons in planet Earth's