Enjoy a tour of the solar system, featuring Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Plus, a recent image from JWST features a complex planetary nebula caused by a dying star and possibly a second star.
Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/Andrea Luck
Monday, 4 August 2025
New images of Phobos, Mars' innermost natural satellite, taken from over the red planet by ESA's Mars Express and processed by Andrea Luck, show the tiny world above Olympus Mons. Captured on 14 May 2025.
Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, L. Lamy, L. Sromovsky
Tuesday, 5 August 2025
This image of Uranus’ aurorae was taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope on 10 October 2022. These observations were made by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and include both visible and ultraviolet data.
An international team of astronomers used Hubble to make new measurements of Uranus' interior rotation rate by analyzing more than a decade of the telescope’s observations of Uranus’ aurorae. This refinement of the planet’s rotation period achieved a level of accuracy 1000 times greater than previous estimates and serves as a crucial new reference point for future planetary research.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Wednesday, 6 August 2025
NASA’s JWST’s view of planetary nebula NGC 6072 in the near-infrared shows a complex scene of multiple outflows expanding at different angles from a dying star at the center of the scene.
There is one stretching from roughly 11 to 5 o’clock, another from 1 to 7 o’clock, and possibly a third from 12 to 6 o’clock. These outflows push gas toward the equatorial plane, forming a disk that appears to span from 9 to 3 o’clock.
Astronomers suspect there is at least one other star interacting with the material cast off by the central dying star, creating the abnormal appearance of this planetary nebula.
In this image, the red areas represent cool molecular gas, for example, molecular hydrogen.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
Thursday, 7 August 2025
On July 19, 2013, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft had a rare opportunity to image Saturn and, far in the background, Earth. This image spans about 404,880 miles (651,591 kilometers) across.
With the Sun’s powerful and potentially damaging rays eclipsed by Saturn itself, Cassini’s onboard cameras were able to take advantage of this unique viewing geometry. They acquired a panoramic mosaic of the Saturn system that allows scientists to see details in the rings and throughout the system as they are backlit by the sun. This mosaic is special as it marks the third time our home planet was imaged from the outer solar system; the second time it was imaged by Cassini from Saturn’s orbit; and the first time ever that inhabitants of Earth were made aware in advance that their photo would be taken from such a great distance.
The Earth is to the right, below the dense rings of Saturn and above the fuzzy outer one.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Björn Jónsson
Friday, 8 August 2025
This is a very early/preliminary attempt to process one of the perijove 73 images from the JunoCam onboard NASA's Juno spacecraft, image PJ73_19. Due to radiation effects, the PJ73 images are extremely noisy and have reduced dynamic range compared to normal JunoCam images. (Jupiter's radiation belts have been a concern for the entire mission.)
The upper image is a color image. The color is a mess and may be difficult to correct. The blue channel is extremely noisy and almost useless - very large-scale features are visible in the blue channel, though. However, the red channel data isn't as bad, so the lower image is processed from the red data only.
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