May 9, 2024, 11:56 AM IST
WISE's mosaic displays the Flame, Horsehead, and NGC 2023 nebulae in the Orion Molecular Cloud. The Flame nebula's brilliance comes not from fire, but from a bright blue star nearby.
The mosaic captures Messier 82 (M82), revealing its striking features: a vivid blue disk, torn clouds, and fiery hydrogen plumes erupting from its core, marking the sharpest wide-angle view ever obtained.
In the predawn hours of Dec 21, 2010, Space Shuttle Discovery pauses at Launch Pad 39A, awaiting rollback to NASA's Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building, as the onset of a total lunar eclipse unfolds.
NASA's Cassini image reveals Sotra Facula on Saturn's moon Titan, a prime candidate for a cryovolcano, with peaks over 3,000 feet and craters plunging 5,000 feet deep.
Pismis 24, an open star cluster, resides in NGC 6357 in Scorpius, about 8,000 light-years away. The central object, Pismis 24-1, once believed to weigh 200 to 300 solar masses, shines brightest in the image.
Saturn's crescent, encircled by its rings, captured by Cassini, with swirling clouds and the moon Prometheus barely visible.
Within the Pleiades star cluster, starlight gradually erodes a drifting cloud of gas and dust. Notably, the star Merope resides near the upper left edge of this Hubble Space Telescope image.
WISE, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, unveiled the vibrant hues of the reflection nebula IRAS 12116-6001, revealing the otherwise invisible interstellar dust cloud through its infrared observations.
NASA's Swift spacecraft captured 330 images to create the highest-resolution ultraviolet mosaic of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, spanning over 220,000 light-years and situated 2.5 million light-years away.