The Stunning Sombrero Galaxy

A stellar fingerprint - an emission-line star known as IRAS 12196-6300

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A Gallery of ‘Tadpole Galaxies’

These postage-stamp-size images reveal 36 young galaxies caught in the act of merging with other galaxies. These galaxies appear as they existed many billions of years ago. Astronomers have dubbed them “tadpole galaxies” because of their distinct knot-and-tail shapes, which suggest that they are engaging in galactic mergers.

Credit: NASA, A. Straughn, S. Cohen, and R. Windhorst (Arizona State University), and the HUDF team (Space Telescope Science Institute) Source: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo0604a/

The Pinwheel Galaxy - this giant disk of stars, dust and gas is 170,000 light-years across; nearly twice the diameter of the Milky Way. It is estimated to contain at least one trillion stars, approximately 100 billion of which could be like our Sun in terms of temperature and lifetime [6000x4690]

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have y’all seen that nasa pic of the earth with the sun behind it on the night time side it really really fucked me up my own soul became solid and like………….. weeped!

some of my favourite absolutely SICK facts about the trappist-1 exoplanets: - theyre all very close to one another and to their star, so the length of a year on them varies from 1 to 20 DAYS - since they’re so close, the star appears a lot bigger than our sun from earth, and from one planet you could easily see the rest, some would even appear bigger than the moon from earth. you could literally see the surface of another planet with the naked eye!!! - they’re probably tidally locked to their star like our moon is locked to earth, meaning only one side of a planet ever faces the star, and on the other side it’s always night. the sun never sets or rises on any of the planets - the star is red, so the sunlight is red/orange, meaning if, for example, plants were to grow there, they could be black and that’s just what we know now, imagine how much cool stuff we have yet to discover about the trappist-1 system

Today’s APOD is particularly stunning.

Have you watched the Perseid meteor shower? Though the annual shower’s predicted peak was last night, meteor activity should continue tonight (August 13/14), best enjoyed by just looking up in clear, dark skies after midnight. Of course, this year’s Perseid shower has the advantage of being active near the August 14 New Moon. Since the nearly New Moon doesn’t rise before the morning twilight many fainter meteors are easier to spot until then, with no interference from bright moonlight. The Perseid meteor shower last occurred near a New Moon in 2013. That’s when the exposures used to construct this image were made, under dark, moonless skies from Hvar Island off the coast of Croatia. The widefield composite includes 67 meteors streaming from the heroic constellation Perseus, the shower’s radiant, captured during 2013 August 8-14 against a background of faint zodiacal light and the Milky Way. The next moonless Perseid meteor shower will be in August 2018.

Image Credit & Copyright: Petr Horálek

Moon and Venus by frankastro

Beware of the Big, Bad Wolf

Visible within the center of the Crescent nebula is what’s classified as a Wolf-Rayet star. This star is a staggering 250,000 times brighter than the Sun, 15 times more massive, and 3.3 times larger. Its surface temperature is nearly 70,000° C/ 125,000° F. At just 4.7 million years old, it is already toward the end of it’s life and is shedding its outer envelope, ejecting the equivalent of the Sun’s mass every 10,000 years. Within a few hundred thousand years, it is expected to explode as a supernova.   (Image Credit: Michael Miller, Jimmy Walker)

Aurora on Saturn.

Hubble Finds an Einstein Ring : These graceful arcs are a cosmic phenomenon known as an Einstein ring - created as the light from distant galaxies warps around an extremely large mass, like a galaxy cluster. (via NASA)