Here are some beautiful space photos and videos that have been posted on the Internet recently. Enjoy!
Image Credit: N. Scoville (Caltech), T. Rector (U. Alaska), NOAO) et al., Hubble Heritage Team, NASA
This spectacular spiral galaxy is about 30 million light-years from Earth and is about 60,000 light-years across. You can see this galaxy with a good pair of binoculars.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team
This esthetic close-up of cosmic clouds and stellar winds features the star LL Orionis, interacting with the flow of the Orion Nebula, in the Name A Star Live constellation Orion. Adrift in Orion’s stellar nursery and still in its formative years, variable star LL Orionis produces a wind more energetic than the wind from our own middle-aged Sun. As the fast stellar wind runs into slow moving gas a shock front is formed, analogous to the bow wave of a boat moving through water or a plane traveling at supersonic speed. The small, arcing, graceful structure just above and left of center is LL Ori’s cosmic bow shock, measuring about half a light-year across. The slower gas is flowing away from the Orion Nebula‘s hot central star cluster, the Trapezium, located off the upper left corner of the picture. In three dimensions, LL Ori’s wrap-around shock front is shaped like a bowl that appears brightest when viewed along the “bottom” edge. The beautiful picture is part of a large mosaic view of the complex stellar nursery in Orion, filled with a myriad of fluid shapes associated with star formation.
This is a NASA video explaining that meteor that exploded over Russia last month.
This is a 4-minute, NASA video about Comet PanSTARRS that may be visible this month. For more information, see our blog article about this comet.