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Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD)
Iridescent Clouds Over Aiguille de la Tsa
14.10.2003
Before the sun rose over the mountains, iridescent colors danced across the sky. The unexpected light show was caused by a batch of iridescent clouds, and captured on film in early September in Arolla, Wallis, Switzerland. The peak in the foreground of the above image is Aiguille de la Tsa.
Pelican Nebula Ionization Front
13.10.2003
What's happening to the Pelican Nebula? The light from young energetic stars is slowly transforming the Pelican's cold gas to hot gas, with the advancing boundary between the two known as an ionization front.
The Coma Cluster of Galaxies
12.10.2003
Almost every object in the above photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured above is one of the densest clusters known - it contains thousands of galaxies. Each of these galaxies houses billions of stars - just as our own Milky Way Galaxy does.
Moonrise Over Seattle
11.10.2003
Is the Moon larger when near the horizon? No -- as shown above, the Moon appears to be very nearly the same size no matter its location on the sky. Oddly, the cause or causes for the common Moon Illusion are still being debated.
Peculiar Arp 295
10.10.2003
A spectacular bridge of stars and gas stretches for nearly 250,000 light-years and joins this famous peculiar pair of galaxies cataloged as Arp 295. The cosmic bridge between the galaxies and the long...
Radio Jupiter
9.10.2003
This view of gas giant Jupiter, made from data recorded at the Very Large Array radio observatory near Socorro, New Mexico, may not look too familiar. In fact, there is no sign of a bright, round planet striped with cloud bands, sporting a Great Red Spot.
The Sombrero Galaxy from HST
8.10.2003
Why does the Sombrero Galaxy look like a hat? Reasons include the Sombrero's unusually large and extended central bulge of stars, and dark prominent dust lanes that appear in a disk that we see nearly edge-on. Billions of old stars cause the diffuse glow of the extended central bulge.
The Colorful Horsehead Nebula
7.10.2003
While drifting through the cosmos, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud became sculpted by stellar winds and radiation to assume a recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is embedded in the vast and complex Orion Nebula.
A Near Record Ozone Hole in 2003
6.10.2003
As expected, the ozone hole near Earth's South Pole is back again this year. This year's hole, being slightly larger than North America, is larger than last year but short of the record set on 2000 September 10. Ozone is important because it shields us from damaging ultraviolet sunlight.
Apollo 12 Visits Surveyor 3
5.10.2003
Apollo 12 was the second mission to land humans on the Moon. The landing site was picked to be near the location of Surveyor 3, a robot spacecraft that had landed on the Moon three years earlier.
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