NGC 6888 // Crescent Nebula, With Central Wolf-Rayet Star WR 136

The Horsehead Nebula in Infrared from Hubble by NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team

Horsehead Nebula // Barnard 33

Scheelite with Pink Apatite on Muscovite

Locality: Mt Xuebaoding, Pingwu Co., Mianyang Prefecture, Sichuan Province, China.

“Mom, pls”

The Great Red Spot on Jupiter gets smaller by 580 miles per year

Messier 1 - The Crab Nebula

Potentially Humanity’s First Historically Observed Supernova

The Crab Nebula is the first astronomical object identified with a historical supernova explosion. Around in the year 1054, Chinese astronomers identified a large bright object that suddenly and mysteriously appeared in the sky. The explosion was so bright that it was even visible during the day time.

700 years later the super nova remnant faded in brightness as it expanded and was nearly forgotten. The Super Nova Remnant was rediscovered in 1758 ( officially re-recorded) by Charles Messier while he was creating a catalog of mysterious objects that looked like comets but were not.

We now know that the beautiful Crab Nebula is the magnificent result of the death of a star, which was unknown to Charles Messier and the Chinese Astronomers that discovered the Object. Now, thanks to space telescopes such as Hubble and Chandra, we can image the Nebula in great detail. The bottom left image is of a small region of the Crab Nebula. It shows “Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities in its intricate filamentary structure” and gives scientists a better understanding of the death of stars. The image to the bottom left shows combined visible light data from Hubble and x-ray data from Chandra.

Credit: NASA/Hubble/Chandra

In this new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, a firestorm of star birth is lighting up one end of the diminutive galaxy LEDA 36252 — also known as Kiso 5649.

(via LEDA 36252, a cosmic tadpole | ESA/Hubble)

Auroras on Jupiter [NASA/ESA Hubble]

Itty bitty Mercury transits the Sun. It was a terribly cloudy morning with really poor seeing, but managed to snap this.