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Picture of the Day

A bright crescent moon glows near the top of a deep blue night sky, with a faint cluster of stars just beside it and scattered stars across the darkness above. Below, a rocky coastline stretches across the frame — a low, tree-covered island and a tall pointed sea stack rise from calm water, silhouetted against a soft pink and orange glow along the horizon. Scattered lights dot the shoreline on the left, reflecting faintly in the still water in the foreground.

Wanderers of the sky and sea

A dark, twisting column of dust with glowing pink edges curls up from the lower part of the frame toward a small, bright knot near the center. It sits amid vast clouds of deep red and dusky blue-gray gas, sprinkled with hundreds of stars across the field.

A dusty trunk

Large glowing clouds fill the frame. One deep red cloud at upper left is split by angular rays of blue light. A deeper blue cloud lies at lower right; a red arc runs up from it to the upper right corner of the frame. Together, these features appear to make up a lion’s head, body, and tail, respectively. The frame is threaded by dark, winding lanes of dust. A dense scattering of small white stars covers the whole scene.

The lion roars

The kingdom’s frontier

On a black, star-filled background float two large, wispy blue bubbles of gas. The rounder one at left has a small bright pink-and-white knot at its lower edge. The bigger, more tangled structure at right blends pale blue filaments with patches of red, all scattered across thousands of faint stars.

An extragalactic supernova remnant

Rings within rings

A large, glowing cloud of gas fills the frame against a dense starfield. Its center glows teal and blue, ringed and streaked by billowing gold, orange, and rust-brown clouds, with dark lanes of dust winding through the right side. The colors are vivid and painterly.

A stellar nursery in Cygnus

A large glowing amber disk — the Sun — fills the frame against a black sky, with a few small dark spots scattered across its left side. The dark silhouette of a tall, intricate broadcast antenna tower runs vertically down the center, crossing the face of the Sun.

Sunspots beside the spire

A dark starfield is veined with faint, wispy brown clouds. At left, a bright patch glows red and teal; at upper right sit a bright face-on spiral galaxy and a smaller, cigar-shaped reddish galaxy.

The Vulcan’s nest

A faint blue-green cloud shaped like a squid stretches across the center of the frame, with two tapering lobes reaching left and right from a brighter, knotted middle. It floats against a much larger backdrop of deep red gas that fills the image in wispy, billowing curtains. Scattered white and pale-blue stars dot the scene.

Waiting in the wings

Wide-field view of deep space showing a bright teal comet near the center with a small, sharp core surrounded by a soft, round green glow. A thin, faint horizontal line crosses directly through the comet. A bright blue star with crisp four-pointed spikes shines above and to the left, set against a dense background of tiny white and reddish stars scattered over mottled brownish-grey dust clouds.

Comet Tempel 2’s dust trail

Virgo vertigo

1 2 3 … 43 Older posts
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