The Mars Express orbiter has taken some stunning photos of Korolev Crater, an ice-filled crater near the Martian north pole. It looks from a distance like a snowy winter landscape on Earth. Mars is famous for its polar ice caps... Continue Reading →
Sometimes it’s all about perspective. This very convincing image of a conjoined moon masquerading as a snowman is actually two separate Saturnian moons – Dione and Rhea – taken from such an angle by the international Cassini spacecraft that they... Continue Reading →
Get out your red/cyan glasses and gaze across the surface of Churyumov-Gerasimenko, aka Comet 67P. The stereo anaglyph was created by combining two images from the Rosetta spacecraft's narrow angle OSIRIS camera taken on September 22, 2014. Stark and jagged,... Continue Reading →
Stars are forming in the gigantic dust pillar called the Cone Nebula. Cones, pillars, and majestic flowing shapes abound in stellar nurseries where natal clouds of gas and dust are buffeted by energetic winds from newborn stars. The Cone Nebula,... Continue Reading →
Why does this galaxy spin so fast? To start, even identifying which type of galaxy UGC 12591 is difficult -- it has dark dust lanes like a spiral galaxy but a large diffuse bulge of stars like a lenticular. Surprisingly... Continue Reading →
An odd thing about the group of lights near the center is that four of them are the same distant quasar. This is because the foreground galaxy -- in the center of the quasar images and the featured image --... Continue Reading →
Scents of Science 