Auroras Colorful Veil Over Earth : NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly Shared This Photograph On Social Media,

Nearby dust clouds in the Milky Way

Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Astronomy Photo of the Day: 5/30/15 — Vividly Blue NGC 7822

This beautifully blue image comes from Manuel Fernández Suarez—an award winning astrophotographer. It provides a window into the heart of a stellar nursery, found approximately 3,000 light-years from Earth in the Cepheus constellation.

Called NGC 7822, it lurks on the outskirts of a behemoth molecular cloud (one of the largest in our galaxy), and contains numerous features, like the star cluster known as Berkeley 59, along with one of the hottest stars in our local part of the galaxy—called BD+66 1673 (there, temperatures can exceed 45,000 K).

As we noted before, “The region, formally known as NGC 7822, contains hundreds of newborn stars that are leaving their own mark on the interstellar material surrounding them, seeding it with heavy elements that will ultimately collapse to give life to a new generation of stars. These same stars are also slowly chipping away at some of the material, they in turn, give it its distinct shape and its designation as an emission nebula.”

Sources & Other Resources: http://bit.ly/1LPOf5M

Image Credit: Manuel Fernández Suarez

Dust, stars, and cosmic rays swirling around Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, captured by the Rosetta probe. (Source)

Spectacular!

Credit: Fragile Oasis

Comas and Tails of Comets The generally unexpected and sometimes spectacular appearance of comets have triggered the interest of many people throughout history. A bright comet can easily be seen with the naked eye. Comets are usually not discovered until after a coma or tail has formed. Depending on the apparent size of the coma or tail, a comet can be very bright. Some comets have a tail extending more than 45˚ on the sky. The earliest records of comet observations date to ~6000BCE in China. The smaller nucleus (rocky body) of a comet, often only a few kilometres in diameter, is usually hidden from view by the large coma, a cloud of gas and dust roughly 10 to the power of 4-10 to the power of 5 km in diameter and not seen with the naked eye, a large hydrogen coma, between 1 and 10 million km in extent, which surrounds the nucleus and visible gas/dust coma. Two tails are often visible, both in the antisolar direction: a curved yellowish dust tail and a straight ion tail, usually of a blue colour. Comets are usually inert at large heliocentric distances and only develop a coma and tails when they get closer to the sun. When the sublimating gas evolves off the surface of a comet’s nucleus, dust is dragged along. The gas and dust form a comet’s coma and hide the nucleus from view. Most comets are discovered after the coma has formed when they are bright enough to be seen with relatively small telescopes. ~ JM Image Credit More Info: Comets, NASA Coma

Wide Field View of Great American Eclipse

Cygnus entering the atmosphere, photographed by Alexander Gerst on the ISS.

What Happened to Mars?

Billions of years ago, Mars was a very different world. Liquid water flowed in long rivers that emptied into lakes and shallow seas. A thick atmosphere blanketed the planet and kept it warm.

Today, Mars is bitter cold. The Red Planet’s thin and wispy atmosphere provides scant cover for the surface below.

Our MAVEN Mission

The Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission is part of our Mars Scout program. This spacecraft launched in November 2013, and is exploring the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere, ionosphere and interactions with the sun and solar wind.

The purpose of the MAVEN mission is to determine the state of the upper atmosphere of Mars, the processes that control it and the overall atmospheric loss that is currently occurring. Specifically, MAVEN is exploring the processes through which the top of the Martian atmosphere can be lost to space. Scientists think that this loss could be important in explaining the changes in the climate of Mars that have occurred over the last four billion years.

New Findings

Today, Nov. 5, we will share new details of key science findings from our ongoing exploration of Mars during a news briefing at 2 p.m. EDT. This event will be broadcast live on NASA Television. Have questions? Use #askNASA during the briefing.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com 

This is one of the largest and most prolific star-forming regions near our Milky Way. Located about 160,000 light years away in the neighboring Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy, the Tarantula nebula is sculpted by searing radiation and strong winds that comes from the massive stars at its center. If fact, it is estimated that at least 40 of these huge stars have gone supernova within the last 10,000 years including the most recent one, SN 1987a. (Composite Image from Multiple Data Sources. Hubble Space Telescope, ESO, Amateur Data. Image Assembly and Processing : Robert Gendler and Roberto Colombari)

Rose-Colored storm on Jupiter captured by Juno spacecraft [1080 x 758]