Wednesday, May 06, 2026

Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin

Monday, 27 April 2026

Dark Ash on Mars

Noticeable change on Mars can take millions of years – but ESA’s Mars Express has captured a blanket of dark ash creeping across the planet in just decades.

The image shows a scene of two halves, with Mars’s typical bright tan-colored sands butting up against dark volcanic ash deposits. When this part of Mars was viewed by NASA’s Viking orbiters in 1976, the ash was noticeably less widespread than it is today.

Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Justin Cowart

Tuesday, 28 April 2026

Neptune and Triton

This image of Neptune and Triton was captured by Voyager 2 as it departed the Neptune system on 31 August 1989. Voyager 2's flyby over Neptune's northern hemisphere bent the spacecraft's trajectory downwards out of our solar system's orbital plane.

Credit: NASA

Wednesday, 29 April 2026

Night and (Earth) Day

This image, released in celebration of Earth Day, shows the terminator – the line between night and day – on Earth. The Artemis II astronauts captured this view on April 2, 2026, during their journey to the Moon.

Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI. Image processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)

Thursday, 30 April 2026

Trifid Nebula

The colors in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope tell a story about density in the Trifid Nebula, a star-forming region about 5000 light-years from Earth. The top left, where it is bright blue, has the least dust. Here, powerful ultraviolet light stripped electrons from nearby gas, creating a glow, with winds creating a bubble by clearing out surrounding dust.

An example of active cloud destruction is toward the top of the head-shaped area with two 'horns.' Bright yellow gas streams upward where gas and dust are being destroyed.

Thicker dust appears dark brown, like mud. In the far-right corner, which is nearly pitch-black, the dust is densest.

Fully formed stars (bright orange orbs) are scattered across the scene. Their light and stellar winds have also cleared the immediate surroundings.

Over millions of years, the gas and dust that make up this nebula (also known as Messier 20 or M20) will disappear, and only stars will remain.

Credit: National Space Science Data Center

Friday, 1 May 2026

First Photo from the Surface of the Moon

Close-up image of the Oceanus Procellarum region of the Moon from the Soviet Luna 9 lander in February 1966.

Luna 9 made the first survivable landing on the moon and snapped the first photos from its surface.

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