Astronomy Now – Astronomy Now

Cosmic sky of red and blue

20 July 2024 Astronomy Now

Splashes of colour illustrate the clear difference between the two most populous type of bright nebulae in our Milky Way Galaxy, emission and reflection nebulae.

Triple T-Tauri

13 July 2024 Astronomy Now

This cavernous nebula is home to a bundle of young stars, specifically a triple system of T-Tauri stars.

Forming stars like the old days

5 July 2024 Astronomy Now

In this image, JWST strips away the gas that is transparent at infrared wavelengths, and reveals a skeleton of dusty ribbons that are part of the material that is flowing onto the young stars as they grow.

A matter of perspective

3 July 2024 Astronomy Now

There’s an almost 3D quality to this image of a portion of the Milky Way, with the illusion that the nebulae are far more distant when in fact they are much closer than the dark dust lanes that meander through the Milky Way.

A more youthful globular cluster

24 June 2024 Astronomy Now

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), which is the nearest galaxy to our Milky Way at about 159,000 light years, is home to about 60 globular clusters. Pictured here is one of these great balls of stars, namely NGC 2210, which shines in the night sky at magnitude +11.

Follow the leader

23 June 2024 Astronomy Now

This line of galaxies is a cosmic coincidence behind the interacting system Arp-Madore 2105-332, which is a pair of galaxies 200 million light years away in the suitably small constellation of Microscopium.

Cassiopeia A’s many faces

22 June 2024 Astronomy Now

This is the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST’s) second view of the Cassiopeia A (Cas A) supernova remnant, the remains of a massive star that exploded in the late 17th century.

JWST captures zooms in on the ‘mane’ of the iconic Horsehead Nebula

30 April 2024 Astronomy Now

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured the sharpest infrared images to date of a zoomed-in portion of one of the most distinctive objects in our skies, the Horsehead Nebula.

NASA’s Voyager 1 probe calls home after five months

25 April 2024 Astronomy Now

For the first time in five months, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to depart the Solar System and fly in interstellar space.

Commercial lunar lander returns America to the Moon

22 February 2024 Astronomy Now

A lander built by the Houston-based company Intuitive Machines touched down near the Moon’s South Pole on Thursday. It was the first lunar landing by a US spacecraft in more than 50 years and the first commercially-operated vehicle to successfully reach the surface.