astronomycolette

[world-beauty]

Water From Orion

Credits: Anglo-Australian Telescope, Anglo-Australian TelescopeBoard

[world-beauty]

Mercury’s Sodium Tail

Credits: Sebastian Voltmer

[catchymemes]

blue sunset on Mars is a real phenomenon caused by the way Martian dust scatters sunlight.

Unlike Earth, where sunsets are red and orange due to the scattering of shorter blue wavelengths by our atmosphere, Mars has an extremely fine dust that scatters blue light more efficiently near the Sun.

So during sunset on Mars, the sky turns reddish-brown while the area around the Sun glows a soft blue. It’s the opposite of what we experience on Earth.

NASA’s rovers have captured this eerie sight

[verseinfinity]

[whirligig-girl]

Commission for @foxgirlchorix of all of Jupiter's Moons, as seen from the cloud tops, with the correct relative apparent sizes for each of the Galilean moons and the inner four asteroid moons.

The sky is blue due to Rayleigh scattering in Jupiter's hydrogen-helium atmosphere. The tan clouds are made of Ammonia ice crystals, and the brown clouds are made of Ammonium Hydrosulfide ice crystals.

Note: The scale is exaggerated--for comparison, Io's apparent size is about the same as the Moon as seen from the Earth, and an alignment of all of the moons like this is impossible (because whenever two of the inner three Galilean moons are aligned with Jupiter, the other is on the opposite side of the sky, due to the 1:2:4 orbital resonance.)

Version without the sky foreground.

[whirligig-girl]

Jupiter's moons from its cloudtops, scaled (roughly) correctly. The view is still impossible, because when Europa and Ganymede are in conjunction, Io is on the other side of the sky, but the apparent sizes are closer to correct. Note that Io is the same apparent size as the Moon as seen from Earth.

[nemfrog]

The earth in space.  The beauty of the heavens. 1842.

Internet Archive

[world-beauty]

Sunspot with Light Bridge

Credits: Mark Johnston

[verseinfinity]

[the-wolf-and-moon]

NGC 2170, Angel

[scifiseries]

[verseinfinity]

[spacewonder19]

Jupiter © NASA Juno 2019

[the-wolf-and-moon]

Mars, Phobos and Deimos

[xanaxfarts]

An assortment of David A. Hardy artworks from the 1970s

[itsfullofstars]

ASTRONOMY PICTURE OF THE DAY May 22, 2026 at 05:00PM After the Crab Nebula, this giant star cluster is the second entry in 18th century astronomer Charles Messier's famous list of things that are not comets. M2 is one of the largest globular star clusters now known to roam the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Though Messier originally described it as a nebula without stars, this stunning Hubble image resolves stars across the cluster's central 40 light-years. Its population of stars numbers close to 150,000, concentrated within a total diameter of around 175 light-years. About 55,000 light-years distant toward the constellation Aquarius, this ancient denizen of the Milky Way, also known as NGC 7089, is 13 billion years old. An extended stellar debris stream, a signature of past gravitational tidal disruption, was recently found to be associated with Messier 2. Image: https://ift.tt/BMinojD via NASA https://ift.tt/L30gxBQ APOD --> https://ift.tt/1wFELeO

[the-wolf-and-moon]

Messier 2, Jewelry Box

[verseinfinity]