Space at
your fingertips.
"I want to know why the universe exist, why there is something greater than nothing."
Steven Hawking
Scientist, Space Lover
Why is there a spiral around the North Pole of Mars? Each winter this pole develops a new outer layer about one meter thick composed of carbon dioxide frozen out of the thin Martian atmosphere. This fresh layer is deposited on a water-ice layer that exists year round. Strong winds blow down from above the cap's center and swirl due to the spin of the red planet -- contributing to Planum Boreum's spiral structure. The featured image is a perspective mosaic generated earlier this year from numerous images taken by ESA's Mars Express and elevations extracted from the laser altimeter aboard NASA's Mars Global Surveyor mission. New missions to Mars planned in the next few years include Insight with plans to drill into Mars, and ExoMars and the Mars 2020 Rover with plans to search for signs of microscopic Martian life -- past and present. Free APOD Lectures: January 5 in NYC & January 9 in DC
Two unusually large sunspot groups are now crossing the face of the Sun. Each group, roughly the size of Jupiter, is unusual not only for its size but because it is appearing over three years after solar maximum, the peak of solar surface activity. Sunspot group 10484 appears near the image center, while sunspot group 10486 is just coming over the left limb of the Sun. The active region associated with Sunspot 484 (the shorter nickname) has already jettisoned a large coronal mass ejection (CME) of particles out into the Solar System. When striking Earth, radiation of this sort has the power to interrupt normal satellite operations while simultaneously providing beautiful auroras. Rotating with the Sun, sunspots 484 and 486 will take about 30 days to make one complete circle, slowly evolving in size and shape during this time. After using extreme care never to look directly at the Sun, the above image was created by holding a digital camera up to a small telescope.
What does the Andromeda galaxy really look like? The featured image shows how our Milky Way Galaxy's closest major galactic neighbor really appears in a long exposure through Earth's busy skies and with a digital camera that introduces normal imperfections. The picture is a stack of 223 images, each a 300 second exposure, taken from a garden observatory in Portugal over the past year. Obvious image deficiencies include bright parallel airplane trails, long and continuous satellite trails, short cosmic ray streaks, and bad pixels. These imperfections were actually not removed with Photoshop specifically, but rather greatly reduced with a series of computer software packages that included Astro Pixel Processor, DeepSkyStacker, and PixInsight. All of this work was done not to deceive you with a digital fantasy that has little to do with the real likeness of the Andromeda galaxy (M31), but to minimize Earthly artifacts that have nothing to do with the distant galaxy and so better recreate what M31 really does look like.
Expanse