Category: Image of the day

Two cosmic structures show evidence for a remarkable change in behavior of a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy.

This false-color view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows clouds in Saturn’s northern hemisphere. The view was made using images taken by Cassini’s wide-angle camera on July 20, 2016, using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to infrared light at 750, 727 and 619 nanometers.

An astronaut aboard the International Space Station adjusted the camera for night imaging and captured the green veils and curtains of an aurora that spanned thousands of kilometers over Quebec, Canada.

Neil A. Armstrong is photographed in the cockpit of the Ames Bell X-14 aircraft at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, was born in Wapakoneta, Ohio, on August 5, 1930.

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover began close-up investigation of a target called “Marimba,” on lower Mount Sharp, during the week preceding the fourth anniversary of the mission’s dramatic sky-crane landing.

Engineers and astronauts conducted testing in a representative model of the Orion spacecraft at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to gather the crew’s feedback on the design of the docking hatch and on post-landing equipment operations.

A team of NASA scientists and engineers is poised to realize a lifetime goal: building an instrument powerful and accurate enough to gather around-the-clock global atmospheric carbon-dioxide (CO2) measurements from space. Developers of the CO2 Sounder Lidar instrument snapped this photo during a field campaign over California and Nevada.

Acadia National Park is one of the most visited parks in America, drawing more than 2.5 million visitors per year to the craggy, jagged coast of Maine. The park is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2016. On September 6, 2015, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on the Landsat 8 satellite acquired these images of the park and its surroundings.

On July 21, 2016, Expedition 48 Commander Jeff Williams of NASA shared this photograph of sunglint illuminating the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, writing, “Morning passing over the Chesapeake Bay heading across the Atlantic.”

The blue dots in this field of galaxies, known as the COSMOS field, show galaxies that contain supermassive black holes emitting high-energy X-rays.

An unusual celestial object called CX330 was first detected as a source of X-ray light in 2009. It has been launching “jets” of material into the gas and dust around it.

NASA’s Scalable Convergent Electric Propulsion Technology and Operations Research (SCEPTOR) project has reached a critical milestone, where the electric propulsion integration and conversion of the Tecnam P2006T aircraft into the X-57 will commence.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the vibrant core of the galaxy NGC 3125. Discovered by John Herschel in 1835, NGC 3125 is a great example of a starburst galaxy — a galaxy in which unusually high numbers of new stars are forming, springing to life within intensely hot clouds of gas.