Autor: NASA

Far across the solar system, where Earth appears merely as a pale blue dot, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft spent eight years orbiting Jupiter. Newly resurrected data from Galileo’s first flyby of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is yielding new insights. via NASA https://ift.tt/2r9ZQcZ

Far across the solar system, where Earth appears merely as a pale blue dot, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft spent eight years orbiting Jupiter. Newly resurrected data from Galileo’s first flyby of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is yielding new insights. via NASA https://ift.tt/2r9ZQcZ

Far across the solar system, where Earth appears merely as a pale blue dot, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft spent eight years orbiting Jupiter. Newly resurrected data from Galileo’s first flyby of Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is yielding new insights. via NASA https://ift.tt/2r9ZQcZ

How great was the Great American Eclipse? The featured HDR image shows it to be perhaps greater than we knew. On August 21 of last year, the Moon blocked the Sun for a few minutes along a narrow path across the USA. Although one of the most photographed events in human history, this image — only recently completed after an extraordinary amount of digital processing — shows one of the most detailed depictions of a solar corona ever taken. Composed of extremely hot gas, the solar corona is only visible to the unaided eye during a total solar eclipse. The featured image combined over 70 images of different time exposures. The series of complementary HDR images recovered enough detail to see motion of the solar corona. The images were taken in Unity, Oregon in the morning to get steady atmospheric seeing conditions. The next total solar eclipse visible on Earth will be in 2019 July, while the next one visible across North America and the USA will occur in 2024 April. via NASA https://ift.tt/2jhCWgq

Flanked by satellite galaxies of the Milky Way a volcanic peak rises from this rugged horizon. The southern night skyscape looks toward the south over Laguna Lejia and the altiplano of the Antofagasta Region of northern Chile. Extending the view across extragalactic space, the Large (right) and Small Magellanic Clouds are so named for the 16th century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, leader of planet Earth’s first circumnavigation. The larger cloud lies some 180,000 light-years, and the smaller 210,000 light-years beyond the mountaintop. Left of the Small Cloud of Magellan and also reflected in the foreground watery shallows on that starry night, 47 Tucanae shines like a bright star. A globular star cluster that roams the halo of the Milky Way, 47 Tucanae is about 13,000 light-years away. via NASA https://ift.tt/2KjMt2E

NASA’s Operation IceBridge successfully collected data over several glaciers, research sites, and some parallel coastal grid lines on April 26, 2018, as part of its Spring 2018 campaign. via NASA https://ift.tt/2HyjdHX

This grand allsky view of our Milky Way and nearby galaxies is not a photograph. It’s a map based on individual measurements for nearly 1.7 billion stars. The astronomically rich data set used to create it, the sky-scanning Gaia satellite’s second data release, includes remarkably precise determinations of position, brightness, colour, and parallax distance for 1.3 billion stars. Of course, that’s about 1 percent of the total number of stars in the Milky Way. Still, the flat plane of our galaxy dominates the view. Home to most Milky Way stars it stretches across the center of Gaia’s stellar data map. Voids and rifts along the galactic plane correspond to starlight-obscuring interstellar dust clouds. At lower right are stars of the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, neighboring galaxies that lie just beyond the Milky Way. via NASA https://ift.tt/2r2I1N2