This close-up from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera shows weathered craters and windblown deposits in southern Acidalia Planitia. A striking shade of blue in standard HiRISE image colors,

This shadowy landscape of majestic mountains and icy plains stretches toward the horizon on a small, distant world. It was captured from a range of about 18,000 kilometers when New Horizons looked back

What does our Milky Way Galaxy look like from the top? Because we are on the inside, humanity can’t get an actual picture. Recently, however, just such a map has been made using location data for over

What does our Milky Way Galaxy look like from the side? Because we are on the inside, humanity can’t get an actual picture. Recently, however, just such a map has been made using location data for over

If you could stand on Venus -- what would you see? Pictured is the view from Venera 14, a robotic Soviet lander which parachuted and air-braked down through the thick Venusian atmosphere in March of 1982.

This picture from July 1997 shows a ramp from the Pathfinder lander, the Sojourner robot rover, deflated landing airbags, a couch, Barnacle Bill and Yogi Rock appear together in this 3D stereo view of

How do black holes create X-rays? Answering this long-standing question was significantly advanced recently with data taken by NASA’s IXPE satellite. X-rays cannot exit a black hole, but they can be created

Cataloged as M1, the Crab Nebula is the first on Charles Messier's famous list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab Nebula is now known to be a supernova remnant, an expanding cloud of debris

In the upper left corner, surrounded by blue arms and dotted with red nebulas, is spiral galaxy M81. In the lower right corner, marked by a light central line and surrounded by red glowing gas, is irregular

What’s causing those lines? Objects in the sky sometimes appear reflected as lines across water — but why? If the water’s surface is smooth, then reflected objects would appear similarly -- as spots. But

How fast can a black hole spin? If any object made of regular matter spins too fast -- it breaks apart. But a black hole might not be able to break apart -- and its maximum spin rate is really unknown.

Like Earth's moon, Saturn's largest moon Titan is locked in synchronous rotation with its planet. This mosaic of images recorded by the Cassini spacecraft in May of 2012 shows its anti-Saturn side, the

The most massive young star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud is NGC 346, embedded in our small satellite galaxy's largest star forming region some 210,000 light-years distant. Of course the massive

The first to orbit inner planet Mercury, the MESSENGER spacecraft came to rest on this region of Mercury's surface on April 30, 2015. Constructed from MESSENGER image and laser altimeter data, the projected

Sometimes, the sky itself seems to smile. A few days ago, visible over much of the world, an unusual superposition of our Moon with the planets Venus and Saturn created just such an iconic facial expression.

Where are Saturn's ears? Galileo is credited, in 1610, as the first person to see Saturn's rings. Testing out Lipperhey's recently co-invented telescope, Galileo did not know what they were and so called

What is creating the strange texture of IC 418? Dubbed the Spirograph Nebula for its resemblance to drawings from a cyclical drawing tool, planetary nebula IC 418 shows patterns that are not well understood.

Main belt asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson is about 8 kilometers long and 3.5 kilometers across. On April 20, this sharp close-up of the asteroid was captured at a distance of about 1100 kilometers by the

Beautiful emission nebula NGC 6164 was created by a rare, hot, luminous O-type star, some 40 times as massive as the Sun. Seen at the center of the cosmic cloud, the star is a mere 3 to 4 million years

What's different about this Moon? It's the terminators. In the featured image, you can't directly see any terminator -- the line that divides the light of day from the dark of night. That's because the