Wired Space Photo of the Day

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Operation Hot Cloud
by Wired Science Staff

Scientists have used Chandra to make a detailed study of an enormous cloud of hot gas enveloping two large, colliding galaxies. This unusually large reservoir of gas contains as much mass as 10 billion Suns, spans about 300,000 light years, ..

 

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Enormous Solar Eruption
by Wired Science Staff

Wired Space Photo of the Day: Enormous Solar Eruption
A coronal mass ejection (CME) erupted from just around the edge of the sun on May 1, 2013, in a gigantic rolling wave. CMEs can shoot over a billion tons of particles into space at over a million miles per ...

 

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Morphological Mars Mystery @ Wired Space Photo of the Day | Wired Science | Wired.com

 

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beautiful

 

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Collection of Mercury Craters

Wired Science » Miscellaneous|Wired Science Staff @ Wired Space Photo of the Day | Wired Science | Wired.com

 

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Colliding Galaxies
by Wired Science Staff @ Wired Space Photo of the Day | Wired Science | Wired.com

As they neared one another and collided their mutual gravitation disrupted the internal motions of the their stars transforming two spiral galaxies into fractured blobs. The spiral nature of NGC 4485 (to the upper right) still survives as these two ...

 

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Slices in Sulci

This perspective view focuses on the southernmost portion of Sulci Gordii, which highlights jagged fractures and fault lines, as well as some sinuous channels that were likely widened by short-lived lava flows or water. In the foreground ... from Wired Space Photo of the Day | Wired Science | Wired.com

 

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Vortex of Color

by Wired Science Staff
This spectacular, vertigo inducing, false-color image from NASA's Cassini mission highlights the storms at Saturn's north pole. The angry eye of a hurricane-like storm appears dark red while the fast-moving hexagonal jet stream framing it is a yellowish green. Low-lying ...more @ Wired Space Photo of the Day | Wired Science | Wired.com

 

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Galaxy, Straight Ahead

Here is a picture of the very thin disk ("line") of NGC 891.

This image was acquired using the Schulman 0.8m telescope. As is often the case, the famous targets must be re-acquired using the best equipment one has at hand and this image is a re-rendering for this ultra famous galaxy at the SkyCenter. The data was taken in the Fall of 2012 and in the Spring of 2013 during for image processing.

 

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Lovely pics!

 

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I do my best to share stuff I hope people will enjoy.

 

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Close-Up Mars Skin

Polygons are of great interest because they often indicate the presence of shallow ice or of desiccation such as in a mud flat. However, nature sometimes seems too clever for us.

Polygons form by the intersecting ridges of sand dunes. If this deposit were to become indurated and eroded, we might not be able to tell that they originated as wind-blown dunes, and interpret the polygons as evidence for a dried-up lake, for example. Dunes often accumulate in the bottoms on craters, also a good setting for a (temporary) lake.

The illumination is coming from the upper left, so the bluish ridges are high-standing.

 

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Two Views of Iapetus

These two global images of Iapetus show the extreme brightness dichotomy on the surface of this peculiar Saturnian moon. The left-hand panel shows the moon's leading hemisphere and the right-hand panel shows the moon's trailing side. While low and mid latitudes of the leading side exhibit a surface almost as dark as charcoal, broad tracts of the trailing side are almost as bright as snow. The dark terrain covers about 40 percent of the surface and is named Cassini Regio. The names of the bright terrain are Roncevaux Terra (north) and Saragossa Terra (south)
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Galactic Wheels

How many rings do you see in this new image of the galaxy Messier 94, also known as NGC 4736? While at first glance one might see a number of them, astronomers believe there is just one. This image was captured in infrared light by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Historically, Messier 94 was considered to have two strikingly different rings: a brilliant, compact band encircling the galaxy's core, and a faint, broad, swath of stars falling outside its main disk.
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Dunes of Titan

Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show that the sizes and patterns of dunes on Saturn's moon Titan vary as a function of altitude and latitude. The dunes in areas that are more elevated or are higher in latitude, such as in the Fensal region pictured at bottom left, tend to be thinner and more widely separated, with gaps that have a thinner covering of sand. Dunes in the Belet region, pictured at top left, are at a lower altitude and latitude. The dunes in Belet are wider, with thicker blankets of sand between them. The Kalahari dunes in South Africa and Namibia, located in a region with limited sediment available and pictured at bottom right, show effects similar to the Fensal dunes. The Belet dunes on Titan resemble Earth's Oman dunes in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, where there is abundant sediment available. The Oman dunes are shown at top right.
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Swirl of Star Formation

Explanation @ Wired Space Photo of the Day | Wired Science | Wired.com

 

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Valhalla Crater
This close up of Callisto shows the heavily cratered surface and the prominent ring structure known as Valhalla. It was acquired by Voyager 1 on March 6, 1979. Valhalla's bright central area is about 300 kilometers across with sets of concentric ridges extending out to 1,500 kilometers from the center.

 

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Fiery Ribbon in Orion

This dramatic new image of cosmic clouds in the constellation of Orion reveals what seems to be a fiery ribbon in the sky. The orange glow represents faint light coming from grains of cold interstellar dust, at wavelengths too long for human eyes to see. It was observed by the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) in Chile. In this image, the submillimetre-wavelength glow of the dust clouds is overlaid on a view of the region in the more familiar visible light, from the Digitized Sky Survey 2. The large bright cloud in the upper right of the image is the well-known Orion Nebula, also called Messier 42.

 

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Ligeia Mare, shown in here in data obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, is the second largest known body of liquid on Saturn's moon Titan. It is filled with liquid hydrocarbons, such as ethane and methane, and is one of the many seas and lakes that bejewel Titan's north polar region. Cassini has yet to observe waves on Ligeia Mare and will look again during its next encounter on May 23, 2013.
Read more @ Wired Space Photo of the Day | Wired Science | Wired.com

 

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Close-Up With Halley's Comet

In 1986, the European spacecraft Giotto became one of the first spacecraft ever to encounter and photograph the nucleus of a comet, passing and imaging Halley's nucleus as it receded from the sun. Data from Giotto's camera were used to generate this enhanced image of the potato shaped nucleus that measures roughly 15 km across. More @ Wired Space Photo of the Day | Wired Science | Wired.com