NASA's Picture of the Day

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Exploring the Ring

Credit & Copyright: Astro-Cooperation - Stefan Heutz/Wolfgang Ries

Explanation: A familiar sight for northern hemisphere astronomers, the Ring Nebula (M57) is some 2,000 light-years away in the musical constellation Lyra. The central ring is about one light-year across, but this remarkably deep exposure - a collaborative effort combining data from two different telescopes - explores the looping filaments of glowing gas extending much farther from the nebula's central star. Of course, in this well-studied example of a planetary nebula, the glowing material does not come from planets. Instead, the gaseous shroud represents outer layers expelled from a dying, sun-like star. This composite image includes over 16 hours of narrow-band data intended to recorded the red emission from hydrogen atoms, but the pronounced blue/green color is due to emission from oxygen atoms at higher temperatures within the ring. The much more distant spiral galaxy IC 1296 is also visible at the upper right.

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Companion of a Young, Sun-like Star

Credit: Gemini Observatory, D. Lafreniere, R. Jayawardhana, M. van Kerkwijk (Univ. Toronto)

Explanation: Located just 500 light-years away toward the constellation Scorpius, this star is only slightly less massive and a little cooler than the Sun. But it is much younger, a few million years old compared to the middle-aged Sun's 5 billion years. This sharp infrared image shows the young star has a likely companion positioned above and left - a hot planet with about 8 times the mass of Jupiter, orbiting a whopping 330 times the Earth-Sun distance from its parent star. The young planetary companion is still hot and relatively bright in infrared light due to the heat generated during its formation by gravitational contraction. In fact, such newborn planets are easier to detect before they age and cool, becoming much fainter. Though over 300 extrasolar planets have been found using other techniques, this picture likely represents the first direct image of a planet belonging to a star similar to the Sun.

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I took astronomy in college as one of my general education requirements for my B.S. degree. M-57 is one of the most amazing things to see in the sky. It's like a giant doughnut.

I also got to tour Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona http://www.noao.edu/kpno/ They have a room with a really large round table. On that table there is huge live picture of the sun. You can see solar flares coming off of it. Although the sun is suppose last many more years. It certainly does not look real stable when you see it up close.

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I took astronomy in college as one of my general education requirements for my B.S. degree. M-57 is one of the most amazing things to see in the sky. It's like a giant doughnut.

I also got to tour Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona http://www.noao.edu/kpno/ They have a room with a really large round table. On that table there is huge live picture of the sun. You can see solar flares coming off of it. Although the sun is suppose last many more years. It certainly does not look real stable when you see it up close.

it really doesnt' does it?

astronomy makes me feel so fragile. I remember in the seventh grade, we were studying the planets and astronomy and there was a girl in there that was so upset to find there is no roof on the sky. She wasn't faking, she couldn't 'get' that only gravity held our atmosphere in place. I still remember how frightened she seemed.

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it really doesnt' does it?

astronomy makes me feel so fragile. I remember in the seventh grade, we were studying the planets and astronomy and there was a girl in there that was so upset to find there is no roof on the sky. She wasn't faking, she couldn't 'get' that only gravity held our atmosphere in place. I still remember how frightened she seemed.

They say the sun is about 4 billion years old and has another 4 billion years left, but that's just an educated guess by scientist. When it dies, it turns into a red giant and expands greatly, probably eating up the inner planets.

When I was at Kitt Peak Observatory, there was no consistent pattern to what the sun would do. It's just a giant burning ball. I was lucky enough to see a couple of random flares come off of it, and the first thing you think is, how stable can the sun possibly be.

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A Darkened Sky

Credit & Copyright: Miloslav Druckmuller (Brno University of Technology), Peter Aniol, Vojtech Rusin

Explanation: For a moment on August 1st, the daytime sky grew dark along the path of a total solar eclipse. While watching the geocentric celestial event from Mongolia, photographer Miloslav Druckmuller recorded multiple images with two separate cameras as the Moon blocked the bright solar disk and darkened the sky. This final composition consists of 55 frames ranging in exposure time from 1/125 to 8 seconds. It spans nearly 12 degrees, with the relative position of the Moon and Sun corresponding to mid-eclipse. On the left is bright planet Mercury, but many stars are also visible, including the Praesepe star cluster (also known as M44 or the Beehive cluster) in Cancer, above and to the right of the silhouetted Moon. Remarkably, the nearly perfect conditions and wide range in individual exposures allow the composite picture to register the lunar surface and follow the delicate solar corona out to a distance of nearly 20 times the radius of the Sun. In fact, the composite presents a range in brightness beyond what the eye could see during the eclipse.