Picture This – Page 20 – Astronomy Now

Mars 2020 rover ready to rock (hunt) and roll

21 June 2019 Astronomy Now

NASA’s Mars 2020 rover now has the wheels it will need to explore Jezero Crater when it lands in 2021. Says a proud engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory: “Now that’s a Mars rover.”

A galaxy being stripped of stars as it plows through a cluster

17 June 2019 Astronomy Now

Stars and long streams of gas are torn away from a galaxy as it plows through the heart of a cluster near the centre of the Great Attractor in a phenomenon known as ram pressure stripping.

Hubble monitors galactic host of multiple supernova blasts

11 June 2019 Astronomy Now

Imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, the active Seyfert galaxy NGC 4051 has hosted at least three supernovae since 1983 that were visible to ground- or space-based telescopes on Earth.

A dark vortex swirling in a Jovian jet stream

7 June 2019 Astronomy Now

The gift that keeps on giving, NASA’s Juno spacecraft is re-writing the textbooks about the inner workings of Jupiter, beaming back stunning photos along the way.

Spitzer snaps family portrait capturing stars from infancy to old age

31 May 2019 Astronomy Now

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, scheduled to cease operations in January, captures a family portrait showing stars spanning the full range of stellar evolution, from infancy to old age.

A rich globular lurking in the shadow of a more famous sibling

27 May 2019 Astronomy Now

Lurking in plain sight just a stone’s throw away from a more famous sibling is the rich globular cluster M92, one of the brightest in the northern sky and a worthy target for even modest telescopes.

Galactic hit-and-run collision spawns firestorm of starbirth in its wake

20 May 2019 Astronomy Now

A glancing collision between two galaxies in the distant past triggered a firestorm of starbirth in the smaller of the two, leaving one side relatively intact while the other was set ablaze by gravitational stresses.

If it looks like a duck… it might be frost on Mars

14 May 2019 Astronomy Now

Late winter sunlight hitting the surface of Mars at a low angle contributes to a striking Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image of sandy terrain dusted with frost, producing graceful shapes that evoke… a duck?

OSIRIS-REx images show asteroid Bennu’s rubble pile appearance

13 May 2019 Astronomy Now

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is busy mapping the asteroid Bennu, revealing a remarkably fractured surface littered with countless rocks of varying sizes giving it the appearance of a jumbled rubble pile in space.

Hubble mosaic merges 7,500 observations into stunning legacy ‘deep field’

5 May 2019 Astronomy Now

A new “deep field” image by the Hubble Space Telescope combines 7,500 images collected during earlier deep exposures to produce a stunning image of an area roughly the size of the full Moon that contains more than 250,000 galaxies.