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Do you recognize this intriguing globular cluster of stars? It's actually the constellation of city lights surrounding London, England, planet Earth, as recorded with a digital camera from the International Space Station. Taken in February 2003, north is toward the top and slightly left in this nighttime view. The encircling "London Orbital" highway by-pass, the M25 (... but not Messier 25), is easiest to pick out south of the city. Even farther south are the lights of Gatwick airport and just inside the western (left hand) stretch of the Orbital is Heathrow. The darkened Thames river estuary fans out to the city's east. In particular, two small "dark nebulae" - Hyde Park and Regents Park - stand out slightly west of the densely packed lights at the city's core. Photo Credit: ISS Crew, Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Lab, JSC, NASA


View of the Remote Manipulator System (RMS) end effector over an Earth limb with a solar starburst pattern behind it.


Europe,and Japan are brightly lit by their cities, while the interiors of Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America remain (for now) dark and lightly populated. (Image by Craig Mayhew and Robert Simmon, NASA GSFC. Based on data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program).


Astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) have seen a lot of auroras in recent months. They've even flown through some. Usually the lights are green; sometimes they're red. Other colors are rare. So when ISS science officer Don Pettit looked out the window on March 29th and saw these striking blue-shaded auroras over Scandinavia, he had to grab his camera and take a picture.


NGC 281 is a busy workshop of star formation. Prominent features include a small open cluster of stars, a diffuse red-glowing emission nebula, large lanes of obscuring gas and dust, and dense knots of dust and gas in which stars may still be forming. The open cluster of stars IC 1590 visible around the center has formed only in the last few million years. The brightest member of this cluster is actually a multiple-star system shining light that helps ionize the nebula's gas, causing the red glow visible throughout. The lanes of dust visible below the center are likely homes of future star formation. Particularly striking in the above photograph are the dark Bok globules visible against the bright nebula. Stars are surely forming there right now. The entire NGC 281 system lies about 10 thousand light years distant. Credit & Copyright: Jean-Charles Cuillandre (CFHT), Hawaiian Starlight, CFHT


The Space Infrared Telescope Facility whizzes in front of a brilliant, infrared view of the Milky Way galaxy's plane in this artistic depiction. The mission marks the last of NASA's Great Observatories, a program that includes the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory. In addition to studying many of the coldest, oldest and most dust-enshrouded objects and processes in the universe, the mission will also be an important part of NASA's Origins Program, which seeks to answer the questions: Where did we come from? Are we alone?


The central region of the small galaxy NGC 1705 blazes with the light of thousands of young and old stars in this image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.


The far side of the Moon is rough and filled with craters. By comparison, the near side of the Moon, the side we always see, is relatively smooth. Since the Moon is rotation locked to always point the same side toward Earth, humanity has only glimpsed the lunar farside recently -- last century. The light highlands of the far side are older than the dark Maria of the near side. A thinner crust on the near side that allowed for more dark lava flows is thought to be the cause of differences between the two sides. The cause for the crust thickness differences is still being researched, however. The large impact basin pictured above is Crater 308. It spans about 30 kilometers and was photographed by crew of Apollo 11 as they circled the Moon in 1969.


A solar wind streams flowing from small coronal holes hit Earth's magnetic field on March 3rd and March 5th. Both triggered G1-class geomagnetic storms. Photo details: Nikkor 28mm / f1.4, Superia 800, and 3 to 8 seconds. John Russell, Nome, Alaska, USA


The martian northern plains remain nearly as mysterious today as they seemed 25 years ago during the Viking missions, even though one of those spacecraft--the Viking 2 lander--went to the northern plains. The northern plains are a lowland with fewer impact craters exposed at the surface than the heavily cratered martian southern highlands. Normally, surfaces with fewer craters are considered younger (i.e., they have had less time to accumulate craters). Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) high resolution images have shown that there really are a lot of craters in this region, but most are thinly buried beneath the plains. This low resolution view, covering an area 168 km (104 mi) by 124 km (77 km), shows a few craters at the surface (such as the one at the center of the image), and several circular features that represent craters that are mostly buried beneath the plains. This view was obtained in August 2002; sunlight illuminates the scene from the lower left. Images Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems. Caption by: K. S. Edgett and M. C. Malin, MSSS


An intense African dust storm sent a massive dust plume northwestward over the Atlantic Ocean on March 2, 2003. In this true-color scene, acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA's Terra satellite, the thick dust plume (light brown) can be seen blowing westward and then routed northward by strong southerly winds. The plume extends more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km), covering a vast swath of ocean extending from the Cape Verde Islands (lower lef), off the coast of Senegal, to the Canary Islands (top center) off the coast of Morocco. The high-resolution image provided above is 500 meters per pixel. The MODIS Rapid Response System provides this image at MODIS? maximum spatial resolution of 250 meters. Image courtesy Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC.


Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) image of a huge, handle-shaped prominence taken on Sept. 14,1999 taken in the 304 angstrom wavelength - Prominences are huge clouds of relatively cool dense plasmasuspended in the Sun's hot, thin corona. At times, they can erupt,escaping the Sun's atmosphere. Emission in this spectral line shows theupper chromosphere at a temperature of about 60,000 degrees K. Everyfeature in the image traces magnetic field structure. The hottest areasappear almost white, while the darker red areas indicate coolertemperatures. Courtesy of SOHO/Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) consortium. SOHO is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.


The International Space Station (ISS) is backdropped over Miami, Florida, in this 35mm frame photographed by STS-108 Commander DomInic Gorie aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Photo credit: NASA


A quarter moon is visible in this oblique view of Earth's horizon and airglow, recorded with a digital still camera aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia.


What could have formed these unusual channels? Inside Newton Basin on Mars, numerous narrow channels run from the top down to the floor. The above picture covers a region spanning about 1500 meters across. These and other gullies have been found on Mars in recent high-resolution pictures taken by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor robot spacecraft. Similar channels on Earth are formed by flowing water, but on Mars the temperature is normally too cold and the atmosphere too thin to sustain liquid water. Nevertheless, many scientists hypothesize that liquid groundwater can sometimes surface on Mars, erode gullies and channels, and pool at the bottom before freezing and evaporating. If so, life-sustaining ice and water might exist even today below the Martian surface -- water that could potentially support a human mission to Mars. Research into this exciting possibility is sure to continue! Photo Credit: Malin Space Science Systems, MGS, JPL, NASA, Astronomy Picture of the Day


The first hint of what will become of our Sun was discovered inadvertently in 1764. At that time, Charles Messier was compiling a list of "annoying" diffuse objects not to be confused with "interesting" comets. The 27th object on Messier's list, now known as M27 or the Dumbbell Nebula, is a planetary nebula, the type of nebula our Sun will produce when nuclear fusion stops in its core. M27 is one of the brightest planetary nebulae in the sky and can be seen with binoculars in the constellation Vulpecula. It takes light about 1000 years to reach us from M27, shown above, digitally sharpened, in three isolated colors emitted by hydrogen and oxygen. Understanding the physics and significance of M27 was well beyond 18th century science. Even today, many things remain mysterious about bipolar planetary nebula like M27, including the physical mechanism that expels a low-mass star's gaseous outer-envelope, leaving an X-ray hot white dwarf.


Andromeda is the nearest major galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy. Our Galaxy is thought to look much like Andromeda. Together these two galaxies dominate the Local Group of galaxies. The diffuse light from Andromeda is caused by the hundreds of billions of stars that compose it. The several distinct stars that surround Andromeda's image are actually stars in our Galaxy that are well in front of the background object. Andromeda is frequently referred to as M31 since it is the 31st object on Messier's list of diffuse sky objects. M31 is so distant it takes about two million years for light to reach us from there. Much about M31 remains unknown, including why the center contains two nuclei.


Jupiter and its four planet-size moons, called the Galilean satellites, were photographed in early March by Voyager 1 and assembled into this collage. They are not to scale but are in their relative positions. Startling new discoveries on the Galilean moons and the planet Jupiter made by Voyager 1 have been factored into a new mission design for Voyager 2. Voyager 2 will fly past Jupiter on July 9.


Known as Seyfert's Sextet, this intriguing group of galaxies lies in the head portion of the split constellation Serpens. The sextet actually contains only four interacting galaxies, though. Near the center of this Hubble Space Telescope picture, the small face-on spiral galaxy lies in the distant background and appears only by chance aligned with the main group. Also, the prominent condensation on the far right is likely not a separate galaxy at all, but a tidal tail of stars flung out by the galaxies' gravitational interactions. About 190 million light-years away, the interacting galaxies are tightly packed into a region around 100,000 light-years across, comparable to the size of our own Milky Way galaxy, making this one of the densest known galaxy groups. Bound by gravity, the close-knit group may coalesce into a single large galaxy over the next few billion years.


Many stars like our Sun were formed in open clusters. The above pictured open cluster, M11, contains thousands of stars and is just over five thousand light years distant. The stars in this cluster all formed together about 250 million years ago. The bright young stars in M11 appear blue. Open clusters, also called galactic clusters, contain fewer and younger stars than globular clusters. Also unlike globular clusters, open clusters are generally confined to the plane of our Galaxy. M11 is visible with binoculars towards the constellation of Scutum.


In the vast Orion Molecular Cloud complex, several bright blue nebulas are particularly apparent. Pictured above are two of the most prominent reflection nebulas - dust clouds lit by the reflecting light of bright embedded stars. The more famous nebula is M78, on the upper right, cataloged over 200 years ago. On the lower left is the lesser known NGC 2071. Astronomers continue to study these reflection nebulas to better understand how interior stars form. The Orion complex lies about 1500 light-years distant, contains the Orion and Horsehead nebulas, and covers much of the constellation of Orion.


An amazing "edge-on" view of a spiral galaxy 55 million light years from Earth has been captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The image reveals in great detail huge clouds of dust and gas extending along and above the galaxy's main disk. Photo credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STSci/AURA)


The Magellan probe that orbited Venus from 1990 to 1994 was able to peer through the thick Venusian clouds and build up the above image by emitting and re-detecting cloud-penetrating radar. Visible as the bright patch below central North is Venus' highest mountain Maxwell Montes. Other notable features include numerous mountains, coronas, impact craters, tessera, ridges, and lava flows. Although the size and mass of Venus are similar to the Earth, its thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere has trapped heat so efficiently that surface temperature usually exceeds 700 kelvins, hot enough to melt lead. Credit: SSV, MIPL, Magellan Team, NASA


Just weeks after NASA astronauts repaired the Hubble Space Telescope in December 1999, the Hubble Heritage Project snapped this picture of NGC 1999, a nebula in the constellation Orion. The Heritage astronomers, in collaboration with scientists in Texas and Ireland, used Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) to obtain the color image. NGC 1999 is an example of a reflection nebula. Like fog around a street lamp, a reflection nebula shines only because the light from an imbedded source illuminates its dust; the nebula does not emit any visible light of its own. NGC 1999 lies close to the famous Orion Nebula, about 1,500 light-years from Earth, in a region of our Milky Way galaxy where new stars are being formed actively. NGC 1999 was discovered some two centuries ago by Sir William Herschel and his sister Caroline, and was cataloged later in the 19th century as object 1999 in the New General Catalogue. This data was collected in January 2000 by the Hubble Heritage Team with the collaboration of star-formation experts C. Robert O'Dell (Rice University), Thomas P. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Study), and David Corcoran (University of Limerick).


What do auroras look like from space? From the ground, auroras dance high above clouds, frequently causing spectacular displays. The International Space Station (ISS) orbits just at the same height as many auroras, though. Therefore, sometimes it flies over them, but also sometimes it flies right through. The auroral electron and proton streams are too thin to be a danger to the ISS, just as clouds pose little danger to airplanes. ISS Science Officer Don Pettit captured a green aurora, pictured above in a digitally sharpened image. From orbit, Dr. Pettit reports, changing auroras can appear to crawl around like giant green amoebas. Far below, on planet Earth, the Manicouagan Impact Crater can be seen in northern Canada. Credit: Don Pettit, ISS Expedition 6, NASA

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