Could Queen Calafia's mythical island exist in space? Perhaps not, but by chance the outline of this molecular space cloud echoes the outline of the state of California, USA. Our Sun has its home within

Why are there so many cyclones around the north pole of Jupiter? The topic is still being researched. NASA's robotic Juno mission orbiting Jupiter took data in 2018 that was used to construct this stunning

The plane of our Milky Way galaxy extends beyond the limb of planet Earth in this space age exposure captured by astronaut Don Pettit. His camera, with low light and long duration settings, was pointed

Very faint planetary nebula Abell 7 is about 1,800 light-years distant. It lies just south of Orion in planet Earth's skies toward the constellation Lepus, The Hare. Surrounded by Milky Way stars and near

Beautiful island universe Messier 94 lies a mere 15 million light-years distant in the northern constellation of the hunting dogs, Canes Venatici. A popular target for earth-based astronomers, the face-on

On the right, dressed in blue, is the Pleiades. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades is one of the brightest and most easily visible open clusters on the sky. The Pleiades contains over

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,