Wednesday, Apr 15, 2026

Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman

Monday, 6 April 2026

Hello, World

NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft’s window after completing the translunar injection burn. There are two auroras (top right and bottom left), and zodiacal light (bottom right) is visible as the Earth eclipses the Sun.

Credit: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2025), processed by ESA

Tuesday, 7 April 2026

Eyes on our Moon

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission acquired this lunar image by rolling one of its satellites sideways to view the Moon instead of Earth. This is part of a regular calibration process, whereby the stable intensity of the Moon’s light makes it possible to detect and correct even the smallest changes in the performance of Sentinel-2’s instrument. This ensures data accuracy throughout the mission, which is critical for its applications.

With an impressive resolution of around 5 km, this image features several famous landmarks, including the Tycho, Copernicus, and Kepler craters, as well as the seas of Rain, Serenity, and Tranquillity. The Tycho Crater is the large, pale, impact crater at the top-right of the Moon in this image. The Sea of Tranquillity is where the Apollo 11 mission touched down in 1969, placing the first humans on the lunar surface. The last crewed mission, Apollo 17, landed in the Taurus-Littrow valley between Serenity and Tranquillity.

Credit: ESA – S. Adenot

Wednesday, 8 April 2026

Extremely Large Telescope from Space

Like a tiny snail shell lying on a beach, a small spiral juts out from the expanse of the Atacama Desert. While most of the lines carving the landscape are natural consequences of geology, the circling path is in fact a road leading up the mountain Cerro Armazones. At the top sits ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction, visible only as a black dot below the center of this image.

Pinpointing the ELT in the vast area of reds and greys might, at first, make its name seem excessive. But it is all a matter of perspective. This photo was taken by Sophie Adenot, a French engineer, helicopter pilot, and astronaut at the European Space Agency (ESA), currently on the International Space Station (ISS) for a long-duration mission called εpsilon. Even from her vantage point, more than 400 kilometers above the Earth's surface, the ELT is a distinguishable feature in the landscape.

Credit: X-ray: Chandra: NASA/CXC/SAO, XMM: ESA/XMM-NEWTON, IXPE: NASA/MSFC; Optical: NSF/NOIRLab; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Schmidt

Thursday, 9 April 2026

Supernova Fresh Look

NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) mission has made a new observation of the supernova RCW 86, shown here in an image released on March 24, 2026. This observation helps fill in a fuller picture of what other telescopes have seen.

The full image combines IXPE’s data with legacy observations from two other X-ray telescopes: NASA’s Chandra and the ESA (European Space Agency) XMM-Newton telescope. The yellow represents low-energy X-rays, while blue shows high-energy X-rays detected by Chandra and XMM-Newton. The starfield in the image comes from the National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab).

Credit: ESA/Juice/JANUS

Friday, 10 April 2026

JANUS sees Comet 3I/ATLAS

A red-green-blue image of 3I/ATLAS taken by Juice’s high-resolution science camera, JANUS, from more than 180 million km away. The comet seems to glow green because gases in the halo around the nucleus emit light at green wavelengths. Background stars have different colors depending on their temperatures.

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