These pictures show the distribution of surface ice at the Moon’s south pole (left) and north pole (right) as detected by thes Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument. The blue areas are the icy regions plotted over images of the lunar surface with the gray scale corresponding to surface temperature (darker representing colder areas and lighter shades indicating warmer zones). As expected, the ice is concentrated at the darkest and coldest locations, the shadows of craters. This data is the first direct, definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon’s surface.
Image Credits: NASA
Astronomers have assembled one of the most comprehensive portraits yet of the universe’s evolutionary history. It’s based on a broad spectrum of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and other space and ground-based telescopes. In particular, Hubble’s ultraviolet vision has been used to track the birth of stars over the last 11 billion years, going all the way back to the cosmos’ busiest star-forming period about 3 billion years after the big bang. This composite image encompasses a sea of around 15,000 galaxies widely distributed in time and space. About 12,000 of them are undergoing star formation. This mosaic is 14 times the area of the Hubble Ultra Violet Ultra Deep Field released in 2014. Right click on the image to embiggen it.
Saturn’s rings are mostly water ice in chunks that range in size from smaller than a grain of sand to mountains. The ring system extends 282,000 km from the planet, but it’s only about 10 m thick in most places. Looking from some angles, it’s possible to see through the rings—as in this that looks from south to north. The Cassini spacecraft took the images stitched together in this natural-color mosaic in April, 2007, when it was about 725,000 kim from Saturn.