This obviously false color animation of Mars shows how its atmosphere glows and pulsates in ultraviolet light every night. It was assembled from months of data taken by the MAVEN spacecraft orbiting Mars. The nightglows occur three times during each rotation of the planet about 70 km above the surface. All three occur at sunset (which is on the left limb of the planet in this view). The pulsations are believed to be caused by downward winds creating nitric oxide in the atmosphere which glows in the UV spectrum. The fact that the three glows occur in data averaged over several months indicates that they are a nightly occurrence.
Video Credit: NASA
This image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope show a galaxy cataloged as NGC 4907. Its about 270 million light-years away. The bright star in the image below the galaxy is in our galaxy. It appears to outshine the billions of stars in NGC 4907 because it is roughly 100,000 time closer to us.
The Cassini spacecraft did a flyby of Jupiter on its way to Saturn. During that pass by the gas giant, it took this picture of the moon Io. The planet and the moon appear deceptively close in this image, but Io is orbiting 217,000 miles above the planet.
Messier 91 is a barred spiral galaxy located in the constellation Coma Berenices. It’s part of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies and is about 63 million light-years away from the Earth. It was the last of a group of eight nebulae discovered by Charles Messier in 1781. Originally, M91 was a missing object in the Messier catalogue as the result a bookkeeping mistake by Messier. It was not until 1969 that amateur astronomer William C. Williams realized that M91 was the galaxy that had also be cataloged as NGC 4548.
On 26 December, 2019, the Juno spacecraft’s orbit around Jupiter brought it near the north pole of the ninth-largest object in the solar system, the moon Ganymede. The spacecraft’s Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) instrument took the first infrared images of the massive moon’s north pole.
This picture was taken aboard the International Space Station on 3 July. Comet NEOWISE is visible above the Earth on the left. The bright “star” just right of center is the planet Venus.
This Hubble image peers deep into the core of the Crab Nebula, revealing its beating heart. At its center are the remnants of a supernova which sends out clock-like pulses of radiation and waves of charged particles. The neutron star at the very center of the Crab Nebula has about the same mass as the Sun, but it’s compressed into an incredibly dense sphere that is only a few miles across. Spinning 30 times a second, the neutron star ticks along, shooting out detectable beams of energy.
