Category: Image of the day

Although Enceladus and Saturn’s rings are largely made up of water ice, they show very different characteristics.

In July 2015, researchers announced the discovery of a black hole that grew much more quickly than its host galaxy. The discovery calls into question previous assumptions on development of galaxies. The black hole was discovered using the Hubble Space Telescope, and detected in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, by ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra.

This curious galaxy — only known by the seemingly random jumble of letters and numbers 2MASX J16270254+4328340 — has been captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope dancing the crazed dance of a galactic merger. The galaxy has merged with another galaxy leaving a fine mist, made of millions of stars, spewing from it in long trails.

NASA’s three WB-57s fly over foggy downtown Houston, Texas during their historic formation flight over the area on Nov. 19, 2015. This photo flight was the first time that all three WB-57s have been aloft simultaneously since the early 1970s, when the U.S. Air Force had an operational squadron of WB-57s.

The springtime phytoplankton communities shown in this image were spotted between the Falkland Islands to the west and South Georgia Island to the east by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument aboard NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite on November 16, 2015.

This image of the northwest corner of Australia was snapped by a student on Earth after remotely controlling the Sally Ride EarthKAM aboard the International Space Station. The program allows students to request photographs of specific Earth features, which are taken by a special camera mounted on the station when it passes over these features.

The Apollo 12 Lunar Module (LM), in a lunar landing configuration, is photographed in lunar orbit from the Command and Service Modules (CSM) on Nov. 19, 1969. Aboard the LM were astronauts Charles Conrad Jr., commander; and Alan L. Bean, lunar module pilot.