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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
Reflections of Venus and Moon
19.05.2018
Posing near the western horizon, a brilliant evening star and slender young crescent shared reflections in a calm sea last Thursday after sunset. Recorded in this snapshot from the Atlantic beach at Santa Marinella...
Attack of the Laser Guide Stars
18.05.2018
Dodging powerful laser beams, a drone captured this stunning aerial view. The confrontation took place above the 8.2 meter diameter Very Large Telescopes of the Paranal Observatory on planet Earth. Firing during a test...
Milky Way vs Airglow Australis
17.05.2018
Captured last week after sunset on a Chilean autumn night, an exceptional airglow floods this allsky view from Las Campanas Observatory. The airglow was so intense it diminished parts of the Milky Way as it arced horizon to horizon above the high Atacama desert.
Rotation of the Large Magellanic Cloud
16.05.2018
This image is not blurry. It shows in clear detail that the largest satellite galaxy to our Milky Way, the Large Cloud of Magellan (LMC), rotates. First determined with Hubble, the rotation of the LMC is presented here with fine data from the Sun-orbiting Gaia satellite.
Kepler s House in Linz
15.05.2018
Four hundred years ago today (May 15, 1618) Johannes Kepler discovered the simple mathematical rule governing the orbits of the solar system's planets, now recognized as Kepler's Third Law of planetary motion.
Saturns Hyperion in Natural Color
14.05.2018
What lies at the bottom of Hyperion's strange craters? To help find out, the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn swooped past the sponge-textured moon in 2005 and 2010 and took images of unprecedented detail.
Sakurajima Volcano with Lightning
13.05.2018
Why does a volcanic eruption sometimes create lightning? Pictured above, the Sakurajima volcano in southern Japan was caught erupting in 2013 January. Magma bubbles so hot they glowed shot away as liquid rock burst through the Earth's surface from below.
A Plurality of Singularities at the Galactic Center
12.05.2018
A recent informal poll found that astronomers don't yet have a good collective noun for a group of black holes, but they need one. The red circles in this Chandra Observatory X-ray image identify a group of a dozen black holes that are members of binary star systems.
NGC 1360: The Robin s Egg Nebula
11.05.2018
This pretty cosmic cloud lies some 1,500 light-years away, it shape and color reminiscent of a blue robin's egg. It spans about 3 light-years, nested securely within the boundaries of the southern constellation Fornax.
Galaxies in the River
10.05.2018
Large galaxies grow by eating small ones. Even our own galaxy practices galactic cannibalism, absorbing small galaxies that get too close and are captured by the Milky Way's gravity. In fact, the practice...
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