Clouds and stars over Greece
Description: It looks like daytime, but it's actually night. Those wonderful orange stripes resemble the afterglow of the setting sun, but in fact they are thin clouds illuminated by the moonlight, converging rapidly toward the distant horizon. The thick cloud on the far left appears to have many layers, but in fact there are only a few pieces, which is caused by the superposition of a large number of independently exposed images. The real situation is that this photo was taken two weeks ago in Sounio, Greece, with a cumulative exposure time of more than 2 hours. The stars in the sky are real, and they are rotating around the North Star in the upper right of the image. What about the prospect of architecture? What looks like some famous ancient building is actually just an abandoned chapel built in the last century.
Black hole binary stars within 3C 75
Description: What happened to the core of this massive galaxy? In this image, which combines X-ray (blue) and radio band (pink), the two bright spots are thought to be supermassive black holes orbiting each other, and they are also the energy source of the huge radio source 3C75. They are immersed in X-ray clouds of up to millions of degrees, spewing out jets of relativistic particles. These two supermassive black holes, about 25,000 light-years apart, located within Abell 400, a star system about 300 million light-years away, are the cores of the two merging star systems, respectively. Astronomers believe that these two supermassive black holes are bound together by gravity in a binary system, and one of the reasons why the jets have observed the appearance of spraying backwards, is likely the result of their joint hands passing through the clouds of the hot star cluster at a speed of 1200 kilometers per second. In the deepest parts of the universe, such spectacular merger events are common. It is expected that they will eventually become a strong source of gravitational waves.
Seagulls and ducks
Description: These two nebulas that look like seagulls and ducks are not the only flying objects in the universe. In this 7-degree-wide image of deep space, seagulls and ducks spread their wings in the sky, pointing to the constellation Canis Major. The seagull on the left consists of two emitting nebulas, NGC 2327 forming the head of the seagull and IC 2177 forming the seagull's wings. Amazingly, the gull wings span a total of 250 light-years, about 3,800 light-years from us, while the duck in the lower right corner spans 50 light-years and is 15,000 light-years away. The giant hot star in the center of the Duck Nebula (NGC2359) emits a high-energy stellar wind, outlining the duck's thick body and attached wings, and this strange appearance makes it also bear the nickname "Thor's Helmet".
Crescent Moon with Seven Sisters
Description: In the image above, the Crescent moon and the many stars in the Seven Sisters Cluster (Pleiades) share the western night sky, which was taken at St. Anthony, Texas, during the spring equinox. The processed digital imagery shows the details of the bright lunar surface and the major stars in the Seven Sisters Cluster. Astronomical images of the Seven Sisters cluster often appear as dazzling blue reflective nebulae, but they are bleached in bright moonlight. On this particular night, astronomers gazing into the night sky in Central and South America will even be able to see a 5-day-old crescent moon slowly passing past some of the brighter Seven Sisters stars.
Gamma-ray sky from the Fermi Space Telescope
Description: What are the bright light sources in the gamma-ray band of the sky? The most complete answer to date comes from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The cosmic gamma ray sources detected by the Fermi telescope include the highest energy particles in nature, with energies ranging from 100 MeV to 100 GeV, about 50 million to 50 billion times the energy of visible photons. A total of 1,451 radiation sources were found and recorded from Fermi's Large Area Detector (LAT) 11 months of sky survey data, including high-energy stars beyond the Milky Way: storm and active star nuclei (AGNs), while within the Milky Way include pulsars (PSRs), pulsar clouds (PWNs), supernova remnants (SNRs), X-ray binary stars (HXBs), and microquasars (MQOs). In the image above, diffuse gamma-ray radiation that runs across the image from left to right is the galactic disk in the center of the Fermi telescope's sky survey. So far, there are still 630 recorded gamma-ray sources that have not been identified, which means that no corresponding sources of low-energy radiation have been found.
Total solar eclipse of the corona
Description: Caused by a total solar eclipse At night, after the solar bulb is completely obscured, the corona is clearly visible and attracts everyone's attention. This mysterious corona is the outer atmosphere of the sun, and its subtle details are very clear to the naked eye, but it is difficult to record. This wonderful image was generated by post-digital processing of multiple images. This is a total solar eclipse that occurred in Mongolia on August 1, 2008, and the images can identify the intricate layered structure, the ever-changing hot atmosphere, and the bright pink prominence at the boundary of the sun wheel.
The planet NGC 2442 in the constellation of Flying Fish
Description: The distorted star NGC 2442 above is located in the southern constellation of Aquila, about 50 million light-years away. This star system has two spiral arms that extend from the distinct rod-like core, forming a hook-like appearance in the wide-angle image. The close-up image, a stitching together of Hubble Space Telescope data, shows the structure of the star system with great clarity, including a core of old yellow stars, as well as a belt of opaque dust around it, a young blue cluster, and a red star birth zone. These clear Hubble image data also leave many more distant background stars behind NGC 2442. The imagery covers an area of about 75,000 light-years
Mars Express photographed by Phobos
Description: Why does this small object orbit Mars? The origin of the larger of Mars' two moons, Phobos, remains an unsolved mystery. Phobos and Phobos are very similar to C-type asteroids, but it is very unlikely that they will be captured by gravity, their orbits will be rounded and they will be dragged into the equatorial plane of Mars. Above is Phobos taken by ESA's Mars Express during its overflight to Mars in mid-March. The Mars Express has been orbiting Mars since 2003. In the center of the image you can see the strange dark ravines on Phobos's surface, a large number of unusual trenches, and a spectacular chain of craters. Phobos is about 25 kilometers in circumference, and its own gravitational pull is not enough to compress it into a spherical shape. Phobos' orbit is so close to Mars that in about 20 million years, tidal action will break the moon into a ring, and the debris will slowly rotate and fall to the surface of Mars.
Auriga deep space image
Description: The gissell plane passes right through the constellation of Auriga, an area rich in nebulae and clusters, a large part of which is located within the 10-degree-wide image of the star above. On the bottom right of the image is β the bright Elnath, which associates Auriga and Taurus. The three open clusters M36, M37, and M38 are arranged in sequence in the upper half of the dense star field in the figure above. The deep-space image also shows several reddish star-forming regions, including emission nebula IC 405, IC 410, and IC 417.
Aurora and stellar trails over the Yukon
Description: As the Earth rotates, a camera fixed on a tripod is able to record the graceful movements of stars. But at high latitudes, in March and April, the camera can also capture the aurora borealis at night at the same time. The weeks around the spring and autumn equinoxes provide the most opportune time for aurora catchers. The above image of the star and sky in the Yukon region of northwestern Canada is one such masterpiece. In the early morning of March 1, 2010, the photographer took this wonderful image under the Klondike Highway, about 60 kilometers south of Dawson, using a combination of short-term exposure images, with concentric stellar arcs and green auroras, which are particularly fascinating.