Planetary Picture of the Day
Week of February 24, 2025
The wonders of the universe always inspire. This week, we have young stars, Earth and Phobos in the sky above Mars, a wide-field view of Uranus, Mercury transiting the active solar surface, and Earth from space.
Monday, 24 February 2025
Peeking into Perseus
This stunning new mosaic of images from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope showcases the nearby star-forming cluster, NGC 1333. The nebula is in the Perseus molecular cloud and located approximately 960 light-years away.
The center of the image presents a deep peek into the heart of the NGC 1333 cloud. Across the image, we see large patches of orange, which represent gas glowing in the infrared. These so-called Herbig-Haro objects form when ionized material ejected from young stars collides with the surrounding cloud. They are hallmarks of a very active site of star formation.
Many of the young stars in this image are surrounded by discs of gas and dust, which may eventually produce planetary systems. On the right-hand side of the image, we can glimpse the shadow of one of these discs oriented edge-on — two dark cones emanating from opposite sides, seen against a bright background.
Similarly to the young stars in this mosaic, our Sun and planets formed inside a dusty molecular cloud 4.6 billion years ago. Our Sun didn’t form in isolation but as part of a cluster, which was perhaps even more massive than NGC 1333. The cluster in the mosaic, only 1–3 million years old, presents us with an opportunity to study stars like our Sun, brown dwarfs, and free-floating planets in their nascent stages.
Tuesday, 25 February 2025
Curiosity Views Earth Setting, Phobos Rising
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover used its Mast Camera, or Mastcam, to capture this view of the Earth setting while Phobos, one of Mars's two moons, is rising. This is the first time an image of the two celestial bodies has been captured together from the surface of Mars. An inset in the image shows Phobos on the left and Earth on the right. From the rover's perspective, the inset area would be about half the width of a thumb held at arm's length.
The image shows the sky over Texoli, a butte on lower Mount Sharp, a 5-kilometer-tall mountain that Curiosity has been ascending since 2014.
Wednesday, 26 February 2025
Uranus Wide-Field
In the center of this wide-field image from JWST is Uranus, one of the ringed planets of our solar system. That's an amazing capture, and it would be extraordinary on its own. But also captured are 14 of the planet’s 27 moons: Oberon, Titania, Umbriel, Juliet, Perdita, Rosalind, Puck, Belinda, Desdemona, Cressida, Ariel, Miranda, Bianca, and Portia. Except for the few stars with diffraction spikes, everything else is a galaxy!
Thursday, 27 February 2025
Mercury Transit
On 3 January 2023, Mercury crossed the Solar Orbiter spacecraft’s field of view, resulting in a solar transit in which Mercury appeared as a perfectly black circle moving across the face of a very active Sun. The Sun loses mass equivalent to billions of kilograms every second due to nuclear fusion, yet it has enough fuel to continue shining for another 5 billion years.
Friday, 21 February 2025
Home
In case you forgot, that's our vessel in space. That's us. That's home. Taken from the cupola of the International Space Station, Aug 10, 2013.
