On March 18, 2011, NASA’s Messenger Spacecraft entered into an orbit around the planet Mercury. This is another first for the human race! No other man-made machine has ever pulled off this gravitational balancing act!
The other day, I posted a picture of the Orion Nebula that I took myself, using my Nikon D300 with a 200 mm lens. I thought you would enjoy seeing how the Hubble Space Telescope views this colorful nebula.
What happens when galaxies get too close to one another? Why a galactic collision of course! Stephan’s Quintet happens to be a pretty violent one.
Most of us have seen the pictures of the lone planet out in space with a dusty looking flat ring orbiting all of the way around it. These rings seem both alien and intriguing – why is it that some planets have rings and our own Earth does not, and which planets in our solar system have such rings?
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope recently imaged these giant green blobs in the vicinity of the spiral galaxy IC 2497. This kind of oddity, which is in the constellation Leo Minor, is not well understood and remains unclassified.