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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
Around The Arches Cluster
14.06.2001
The most compact cluster of stars known in our galaxy, the Arches cluster, boasts 100 or so massive, young stars contained within a diameter of one light-year. Seen toward the constellation Sagittarius, the Arches...
M94: Beyond the Blue
13.06.2001
Today's galaxy, M94 (NGC 4736), lies 15 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici. In the red light image (left), its very bright nucleus and tightly wound spiral arms seem to slowly fade into a faint outer disk.
The Cartwheel Galaxy
12.06.2001
By chance, a collision of two galaxies has created a surprisingly recognizable shape on a cosmic scale. The Cartwheel Galaxy is part of a group of galaxies about 500 million light years away in the constellation Sculptor. Two smaller galaxies in the group are visible on the left of the above photograph.
Globular Cluster M2
11.06.2001
Beneath the south pole of our Milky Way Galaxy lies a ball of over 100,000 stars. M2, the second object on Charles Messier's eighteenth century list of bright diffuse sky objects...
Giant Cluster Bends, Breaks Images
10.06.2001
What are those strange blue objects? Many are images of a single, unusual, beaded, blue, ring-like galaxy which just happens to line-up behind a giant cluster of galaxies. Cluster galaxies here appear yellow and -- together with the cluster's dark matter -- act as a gravitational lens.
Apollo 17 s Lunar Rover
9.06.2001
In December of 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent about 75 hours exploring the Moon's Taurus-Littrow valley while colleague Ronald Evans orbited overhead. Cernan and Schmitt were the last humans to walk or ride on the Moon - aided in their explorations by a Lunar Roving Vehicle.
Three Galaxies in Draco
8.06.2001
This intriguing trio of galaxies is sometimes called the NGC 5985/Draco Group and so (quite reasonably) is located in the northern constellation Draco. From left to right are face-on spiral NGC 5985, elliptical galaxy...
NGC 253: X Ray Zoom
7.06.2001
Astronomers now report that Chandra X-ray Observatory observations of galaxies known to be frantically forming stars show that these galaxies also contain luminous x-ray sources -- thought to be intermediate mass black holes and immense clouds of superheated gas. Take the lovely island universe NGC 253 for example.
NGC 1512: A Panchromatic View
6.06.2001
This spectacular color picture of the core of barred spiral galaxy NGC 1512 (bottom panel) is a composite of the seven Hubble Space Telescope images arrayed along the top. Each top panel image was made with a filter and camera sensitive to a different wavelength band in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Asteroid Eros Reconstructed
5.06.2001
Orbiting the Sun between Mars and Earth, asteroid 433 Eros was visited by the robot spacecraft NEAR-Shoemaker in 2000 February. Some of the 100,000+ images taken by NEAR of the tumbling space rock have been combined into the above high-resolution composite.
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