Photographer Luc Jamet Recently Won Astronomy Photographer Of The Year For This Gorgeous And Eerie Image

Looking like an elegant abstract art piece painted by talented hands, this picture is actually a NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of a small section of the Carina Nebula.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Any minute now, NASA’s Juno will be entering Jupiter’s orbit. So here is a photo of an aurora on Jupiter.

Aurora on Saturn.

The Icy Comet

This image of Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) was taken at the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Ariz

Image credit: NASA/ National Science Foundation

Comas and Tails of Comets The generally unexpected and sometimes spectacular appearance of comets have triggered the interest of many people throughout history. A bright comet can easily be seen with the naked eye. Comets are usually not discovered until after a coma or tail has formed. Depending on the apparent size of the coma or tail, a comet can be very bright. Some comets have a tail extending more than 45˚ on the sky. The earliest records of comet observations date to ~6000BCE in China. The smaller nucleus (rocky body) of a comet, often only a few kilometres in diameter, is usually hidden from view by the large coma, a cloud of gas and dust roughly 10 to the power of 4-10 to the power of 5 km in diameter and not seen with the naked eye, a large hydrogen coma, between 1 and 10 million km in extent, which surrounds the nucleus and visible gas/dust coma. Two tails are often visible, both in the antisolar direction: a curved yellowish dust tail and a straight ion tail, usually of a blue colour. Comets are usually inert at large heliocentric distances and only develop a coma and tails when they get closer to the sun. When the sublimating gas evolves off the surface of a comet’s nucleus, dust is dragged along. The gas and dust form a comet’s coma and hide the nucleus from view. Most comets are discovered after the coma has formed when they are bright enough to be seen with relatively small telescopes. ~ JM Image Credit More Info: Comets, NASA Coma

This is Pluto as never seen before in human history.

If you couldn’t tell already, NASA is having a great year. From Pluto to food grown in space, even in the face of budget cuts, the nation’s space agency had some stellar highlights. Most mysteriously of all, a spacecraft found two eerily bright lights on a distant dwarf planet.

Dust, stars, and cosmic rays swirling around Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, captured by the Rosetta probe. (Source)

The Wow! signal. 

A signal sequence that lasted for 72 seconds in 1977 but has never been seen again. The signal appeared to come from a globular cluster in the Sagittarius constellation, but to this day no definite answer for where the signal originated can be given.