Mike Willmoth @mwillmoth

The night side of Pluto spans this shadowy scene. In the stunning spacebased perspective the Sun is 4.9 billion kilometers (almost 4.5 light-hours) behind the dim and distant world. It was captured by far flung New Horizons in July of 2015 when the spacecraft was at a range of some 21,000 kilometers from Pluto, about 19 minutes after its closest approach. A denizen of the Kuiper Belt in dramatic silhouette, the image also reveals Pluto's tenuous, surprisingly complex layers of hazy atmosphere. Near the top of the frame the crescent twilight landscape includes southern areas of nitrogen ice plains now formally known as Sputnik Planitia and rugged mountains of water-ice in the Norgay Montes. Image Credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest Research Institute

A breathtaking view of Saturn captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft! 😍

The Butterfly Nebula from Hubble

Did you know? The Earth's magnetic field deflects a huge amount of solar material. Each second, 1.5 million tons of solar material shoot off of the Sun, traveling at hundreds of miles per second. [📹 NASA] x.com/i/status/17426…

Stars in bloom 🌹 Bright, colorful patches of star formation unfurl like red roses in this #HubbleClassic image. Known as NGC 972, this spiral galaxy is just under 70 million light-years away from us. Discover more: go.nasa.gov/4ejzYRo

A nearly 100-billion-mile-diameter debris disk encircles the star Vega. Astronomers have long assumed this was a disk of planet-forming material, but new observations with Hubble and @NASAWebb offer a different verdict. "The Vega disk is smooth, ridiculously smooth."

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Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 6744 is nearly 175,000 light-years across, larger than our own Milky Way. It lies some 30 million light-years distant in the southern constellation Pavo but appears as only a faint smudge in the eyepiece of a small telescope. We see the disk of the nearby island universe tilted towards our line of sight in this remarkably deep and detailed galaxy portrait, a telescopic image that spans an area about the angular size of a full moon. In it, the giant galaxy's elongated yellowish core is dominated by the light from old, cool stars. Beyond the core, grand spiral arms are filled with young blue star clusters and speckled with pinkish star forming regions. An extended arm sweeps past smaller satellite galaxy NGC 6744A at the upper left. NGC 6744's galactic companion is reminiscent of the Milky Way's satellite galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud. Image Credit & Copyright: John Hayes

It’s behind me… isn’t it? 👀 Happy Halloween from Hubble and @NASAWebb! This joint image shows a pair of "eyes" that are really the cores of two galaxies. The colors come from Webb's infrared data combined with visible and ultraviolet light from Hubble: go.nasa.gov/3NKwD2S

What created this huge space bubble? Blown by the wind from a star, this tantalizing, head-like apparition is cataloged as NGC 7635, but known simply as the Bubble Nebula. The featured striking view utilizes a long exposure to reveal the intricate details of this cosmic bubble and its environment. Although it looks delicate, the 10 light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Seen here above and right of the Bubble's center, a bright hot star is embedded in the nebula's reflecting dust. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from the star, which likely has a mass 10 to 20 times that of the Sun, has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The intriguing Bubble Nebula lies a mere 11,000 light-years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia. Credit & Copyright: Chad Leader

Our ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week features the unbarred spiral galaxy NGC 4414 ✨ 1/5

These brightly outlined flowing shapes look ghostly on a cosmic scale. A telescopic view toward the constellation Cassiopeia, the colorful skyscape features the swept-back, comet-shaped clouds IC 59 (left) and IC 63. About 600 light-years distant, the clouds aren't actually ghosts. They are slowly disappearing though, under the influence of energetic radiation from hot, luminous star gamma Cas. Gamma Cas is physically located only 3 to 4 light-years from the nebulae and lies just above the right edge of the frame. Slightly closer to gamma Cas, IC 63 is dominated by red H-alpha light emitted as hydrogen atoms ionized by the hot star's ultraviolet radiation recombine with electrons. Farther from the star, IC 59 shows less H-alpha emission but more of the characteristic blue tint of dust reflected star light. The field of view spans over 1 degree or 10 light-years at the estimated distance of the interstellar apparitions. Image Credit & Copyright: Christophe Vergnes, Hervé Laur

What is the most spook-tacular nebula in the galaxy? One contender is LDN 43, which bears an astonishing resemblance to a vast cosmic bat flying amongst the stars on a dark Halloween night. Located about 1400 light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, this molecular cloud is dense enough to block light not only from background stars, but from wisps of gas lit up by the nearby reflection nebula LBN 7. Far from being a harbinger of death, this 12-light year-long filament of gas and dust is actually a stellar nursery. Glowing with eerie light, the bat is lit up from inside by dense gaseous knots that have just formed young stars. Credit & Copyright: Mark Hanson and Mike Selby; Text: Michelle Thaller (NASA's GSFC)

Happy #SunDay! This week’s space weather report includes: · 6 M-class flares · 1 X-class flare · 29 coronal mass ejections · 0 geomagnetic storms This video from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory shows the week’s activity. 🔥 Hot tip: The X3.3 flare is at 2:44!

On the move 👋 This new #HubbleFriday view shows the galaxy IC 3225, which looks like it's speeding through space. Its distorted shape likely formed when it rammed through a thick intracluster medium of gas and dust, which stripped IC 3225 of some gas: go.nasa.gov/48CT2ZX

Some 13,000 light-years away toward the southern constellation Pavo, the globular star cluster NGC 6752 roams the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Over 10 billion years old, NGC 6752 follows clusters Omega Centauri, 47 Tucanae, and Messier 22 as the fourth brightest globular in planet Earth's night sky. It holds over 100 thousand stars in a sphere about 100 light-years in diameter. Telescopic explorations of NGC 6752 have found that a remarkable fraction of the stars near the cluster's core, are multiple star systems. They also reveal the presence of blue straggle stars, stars which appear to be too young and massive to exist in a cluster whose stars are all expected to be at least twice as old as the Sun. The blue stragglers are thought to be formed by star mergers and collisions in the dense stellar environment at the cluster's core. This sharp color composite also features the cluster's ancient red giant stars in yellowish hues. (Note: The bright, spiky blue star about 8 o'clock from the cluster center is a foreground star along the line-of-sight to NGC 6752). Image Credit & Copyright: Massimo Di Fusco, Aygen Erkaslan

Let's go stargazing with Hubble & @NASAWebb! NGC 602 is a gorgeous star cluster within the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy that orbits our own Milky Way. Hubble took a look in visible light (left) and found that NGC 602 hosts very young, low-mass stars.

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A mere seven hundred light years from Earth toward the constellation Aquarius, a star is dying. The once sun-like star's last few thousand years have produced the Helix Nebula. Also known as NGC 7293, the cosmic Helix is a well studied and nearby example of a Planetary Nebula, typical of this final phase of stellar evolution. Combining narrow band data from emission lines of hydrogen atoms in red and oxygen atoms in blue-green hues, this deep image shows tantalizing details of the Helix, including its bright inner region about 3 light-years across. The white dot at the Helix's center is this Planetary Nebula's hot, dying central star. A simple looking nebula at first glance, the Helix is now understood to have a surprisingly complex geometry. Image Credit & Copyright: Patrick Winkler

Jupiter's moon Io in true color

A new solar science instrument is about to be mounted on the International Space Station. How does it work, and what could it discover? 🤔 Find out this Wednesday at 1pm ET, when experts will be answering YOUR questions about new science heading to space! 👇

NASA Science @NASAScience_

2 years ago

Looking forward to a fa-boo-lous webinar. 👻 Researchers will answer questions about science heading to @Space_Station, including measuring solar winds and testing cold-welding in space. Submit your Qs using #ISSNationalLab. Join us on 10/23 at 1pm ET. issnationallab.org/press-releases…

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