Pandora is one of Saturn’s many baby moons, far too runty to form a sphere under its own gravity. Instead, this 52-mile across space rock looks more like a fossilized glob of silly putty in closest image ever captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
Last night, photographers around the world turned their cameras to the sky to capture the closest full moon—also known as a supermoon—since 1948. We’ve scoured the web to bring you some of our favorite photos of the celestial event that took our minds off the current state of world affairs for a few blissful minutes.
One of the simple wonders of living on a spinning ball with a thin atmosphere in a densely packed corner of space is the view. Many of us dream of settling down by a picturesque coastline or a rugged mountainscape, but we so often forget that the best scenery on planet Earth is located directly overhead.
When the first deadly avalanche struck the Aru Range in Tibet on July 17th, scientists were puzzled. But when a second enormous ice slide occurred just a few kilometers south and two months later, they were shocked.
At 6:39 am EDT today, a spacecraft weighing over 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) with a wingspan half that of a Boeing 747 crashed gently into a comet’s surface, following 13 hours of free-fall. These, my friends, are the last, fleeting glimpses of Comet 67P that Rosetta managed to capture before its instruments went…
If you, like me, are a space nerd living in a city, then you can appreciate the struggle of finding clear skies to watch a meteor shower. But while I couldn’t make it out from under Philly’s omnipresent light pollution umbrella last week, I got a taste of the Perseid meteor shower thanks to the brilliant work of…
If you needed proof that the future of reusable rocket technology is going to be spectacular, look no further than SpaceX’s latest launch-and-landing time exposure photo, which shows a Falcon 9 rocket screaming away from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (left), before the first stage booster lands…
If you want to see beautiful auroras, forget Alaska, Canada, and Iceland—check out Jupiter. At the gas giant’s north pole, the most powerful and luminous northern lights in the solar system shimmer and glow in an endless geomagnetic storm that’s larger than our entire planet.
So you missed Mercury transiting the Sun last month and thought you were going to have to wait another three whole years to see the rare astronomical event? Not at all. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Laboratory was busy shooting the entire thing in 4K, and it just released three glorious highlight reels. Even if you did tune…
Welcome to the Universe, IRAS 14568-6304. There’s no catchy name for this particular stellar object, because it’s too new to have been given one.
New Horizons may be millions of miles beyond Pluto in the Kuiper Belt right now, but that hasn’t stopped the spacecraft from continuing to beam back glorious imagery of its encounter with our solar system’s weirdest little ice world. A new NASA video reveals the most detailed images of Pluto’s surface yet—and they’re…
Years of drought have not been kind to Lake Mead, the largest man-made reservoir in the United States formed by the Hoover Dam in the 1930s. The lake, which hit its lowest level since 1937 this week, is a shadow of its former self in a dramatic new satellite image captured by NASA.
This colorful image may look like a work of modern art, but it’s actually a false-color satellite image of Rub’ al Khali—the largest contiguous sand desert in the world, and home to insanely hostile conditions.
If you like jigsaws, you’d love to be on the team at the European Space Agency that created this image. Made up of 7,000 separate files—totalling 32 TB of data—the picture provides a completely cloud-free view of the whole of Africa.
When SpaceX managed to safely land its 3rd Falcon 9 rocket ten days ago, Elon Musk tweeted that the company “may need to increase [the] size of [its] rocket storage hangar.” He wasn’t kidding.
The American artist Peter Halley has taken over 5,000 square feet of the Schirn Kunsthalle exhibition hall in Frankfurt, turning its huge rotunda into a futuristic exploration of architecture and space that’s inspired in part by the LHC.
Otto Lilienthal was the first human to develop and create a production aircraft, going on to make over 2,000 well-documented gliding flights. But now, 125 years on, a model of his creation is inside a modern wind tunnel.
This quarter-inch diameter chip was photographed by British astronaut Tim Peake from inside the Cupola module of the International Space Station. Alarmingly, it’s actually in one of the windows.
Long exposure shots always make nighttime scenes look futuristic. This isn’t a frame from a science fiction movie, then, but rather U.S. Coast Guard members shooting a 50 caliber machine gun at night aboard Coast Guard Cutter Stratton.
Last week, bioengineering’s most advanced prosthetics were shown off at the world’s largest orthopedics event in Germany. But in Afghanistan, things are a little different.
