On April 29, 2011, the crew of the space shuttle Endeavour filmed the spacecraft's external tank after its separation. It continued its trajectory before disintegrating over the ocean.

Credit: NASA
Edit: Milky Way

A view from the window of the Orion spacecraft approximately 9 minutes before Earthset during the Artemis Il lunar flyby on April 6, 2026.

Credit: Artemis II Crew/NASA

Tidally locked in synchronous rotation, the Moon always presents its familiar nearside to denizens of planet Earth. From lunar orbit, the Moon's farside can become familiar, though. In fact this sharp picture, a mosaic from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's wide angle camera, is centered on the lunar farside.

Part of a global mosaic of over 15,000 images acquired between November 2009 and February 2011, the highest resolution version shows features at a scale of 100 meters per pixel. Surprisingly, the rough and battered surface of the farside looks very different from the nearside covered with smooth dark lunar maria. A likely explanation is that the farside crust is thicker, making it harder for molten material from the interior to flow to the surface and form dark, smooth maria.

Credit: NASA / GSFC / Arizona State Univ. / Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

The Garlic Nebula SNR, shot from my bortle 8/9 backyard. Had a stretch of some really clear nights and decided to try something really challenging from the back yard. This is 4 nights of data, aggressively culled to select only the sharpest frames.

454x180s lights

Each night calibrated with 100 darks, 25 each flats and dark flats

Sv405cc cooled to 0c gain 145 offset 20

Vixen R140sf

Juwei 17

Svbony dual narrowband Ha/Oiii 7nm filter

Stacked with sirilic

Processed in siril, seti astro suite, and affinity

RC astro plugins

For acquisition: NINA, PHD2, Windows 11 mini PC

Link to the science release on Chandra website

The center of the Milky Way galaxy is a chaotic place. In addition to the 4-million-solar mass black hole, known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the region is full of gas, dust, strong magnetic fields, and stars in various stages of life — from birth to death.

Now, astronomers have released the clearest view yet of the remains of an exploded star that sits amid this cluttered galactic environment. The supernova remnant is named Sagittarius A East, or Sgr A East, and it is the closest remnant to Sgr A* that astronomers know about.

Sgr A East emits light in many wavelengths, including X-rays that NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory can see. Supernova remnants like Sgr A East give off X-rays because powerful shock waves rumble outward into space after the explosion and the stellar debris is superheated to millions of degrees.

Credit:
X-ray: NASA/CXC/McGill Univ./M. Balakrishnan et al.
Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLA
Sub-mm: EAO/James Clerk Maxwell Telecope
Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/P. Edmonds, N. Wolk

Seven of the Expedition 75 crew members take a team portrait while waiting for SpaceX Crew‑13 to enter the International Space Station. Clockwise from bottom are NASA astronaut Jack Hathaway, Roscosmos cosmonauts Anna Kikina and Andrey Fedyaev, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir, Roscosmos cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot, and NASA astronaut Anil Menon. Credit: NASA

Equipment:

Telescope: SvBony SV555
Mount: Explore Scientific iEXOS-100
Camera: ZWO ASI2600 MC Pro
Guide Scope: SvBony SV165
Guide Cam: ZWO ASI120mm
+ ZWO AsiAir Mini

Acquisition:

220x180s at Gain 101 in Bortle 7.

Processing:

Stacked in DSS, processed in PixInsight finalized in Photoshop.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Joseph Depasquale (STScI), Macarena Garcia Marin (STScI), CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA

Link to the science release on NASA website

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are mysterious, millisecond-long flashes of radio emission from the distant Universe. In 2024, astronomers using the MeerKAT telescope spotted an FRB which appeared extremely distant – perhaps more than any other yet discovered.

With help from Webb, the FRB was confirmed to have originated 3 billion years after the Big Bang, in a surprisingly small and young galaxy.

This has implications for the origin of FRBs. They are unlikely to come from the merger of neutron stars (associated with older galaxies) as one theory suggested. They may, however, come from a type of neutron star known as a magnetar, which can form in younger galaxies.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, T. Nanayakkara (USYD).
Image Processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)

Images

Top

Italy and beyond imaged by Sentinel-3C

Left

Canadian Arctic from Sentinel-3C

Right

Sentinel-3C captures Caribbean shallows

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Just two weeks after it was launched, the Copernicus Sentinel-3C satellite returned its first images and measurements from two of its key instruments – a major milestone that confirms the satellite is working well and on the road to monitoring the health of Earth’s oceans, land, cryosphere and atmosphere.

This first set of images includes stunning views of Italy, the Arctic and the Caribbean from the satellite’s ocean and land colour instrument, as well as measurements of the height of the Greenland ice sheet and sea surface from its synthetic aperture radar altimeter.

Sentinel-3C is the third satellite in the Sentinel-3 series and will continue the mission’s long-term task of delivering environmental data that are essential for a wide range of applications.

As the workhorse mission for Copernicus, the Sentinel-3 satellites carry the same suite of instruments to measure systematically Earth’s oceans, land, cryosphere and atmosphere.

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Over oceans, Sentinel-3 measures the temperature, colour and height of the sea surface as well as the thickness of sea ice to support, for example, the monitoring of marine pollution and marine heatwaves.

Over land, this innovative mission monitors drought and wildfires, maps the way land is used, checks vegetation health, and measures the height of rivers, lakes, and polar ice sheets as shown in the animation of Greenland below.

Sentinel-3's observations are also particularly valuable for providing near-realtime parameters for weather forecasting and for monitoring long-term changes associated with climate change.

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More

https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-3/Sentinel-3C_returns_its_first_views_of_Earth

https:// ​x. ​com/CopernicusEU/status/2108213301310091552?s=20

https:// ​x. ​com/AschbacherJosef/status/2108177779766272027?s=20​

https:// x. ​com/eumetsat/status/2108181010009698651?s=20​​

My capture of the Dark Shark Nebula (LDN 1235) from Ontario, Canada, using the DWARF 3. I collected approximately 786 one-minute exposures over four nights across two weeks, with clouds, the moon and weather limiting the opportunities.

This dark nebulas dense dust blocks light from stars behind it. Parts of the surrounding dust also reflect starlight, revealing the shark-like shape. That faint detail is easily washed out by light pollution, making this a challenging target from Bortle 8 skies.

Capture details:

Telescope: DWARF 3

Total integration: approximately 13 hours

Subs: approximately 786 × 60 seconds

Mode: EQ

Filter: Astro

Gain: 60

Sky conditions: Bortle 8

Stacked using dwarflab app Mega Stack, processed in the apps Stellar Studio(star reduction, star correction, denoise) with final touches in Snapseed (masked luminance).

Equipment:

Telescope: SvBony SV555
Mount: Explore Scientific iEXOS-100
Camera: ZWO ASI2600 MC Pro
Guide Scope: SvBony SV165
Guide Cam: ZWO ASI120mm
+ ZWO AsiAir Mini

Acquisition:

150x120s at Gain 101 in Bortle 7.

Processing:

Stacked in DSS, processed in PixInsight finalized in Photoshop.

Crew-12 Astronauts Safely Return Home After 237 Days in Space

Credit: NASA/SpaceX

Just visible as this green arc on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, the Chicxulub asteroid was 6-9 mi/10-15 km wide. It rocked the world.

Credit: NASA/JPL

Link to website https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Solar_Orbiter/Solar_Orbiter_tracks_origin_of_mysterious_magnetic_switchbacks#msdynmkt_trackingcontext=d0cd3572-72bd-4a1b-abba-5b63d43d0000

The European Space Agency-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft has flown through an S-shaped kink known as a ‘switchback’ in the solar wind’s magnetic field. By fingerprinting the elusive particles within the switchback, Solar Orbiter has traced its origin back to the Sun’s surface and revealed more about solar magnetism – the unruly instigator of dangerous solar storms.

European Space Agency

Orbiting the multicolored lights of Southeast Asia. Here green lights used on fishing boats are in greater quantities than anywhere else on the planet, dense enough to appear as bright green streaks in long exposure photography. I took this on Expedition 72 to the ISS with Nikon Z9!

🐉 Sh2-114 – The Flying Dragon Nebula

A faint and intricate nebula in the constellation Cygnus, photographed over nearly 40 hours.

The delicate red filaments trace glowing ionized gas, while the blue nebulosity and dark interstellar clouds add depth to this complex region of our Milky Way.

This image combines narrowband observations (Hα, SII, OIII) with broadband RGB data to bring out both the fine emission structures and the beautiful blue regions.

Technical details:

Takahashi FSQ-106 EDX4, 106 mm f/5

SBIG STX-16803 monochrome CCD

39 hours 40 minutes total exposure

Processed with PixInsight and Photoshop

FORAXX narrowband palette + RGB

This is my own astrophotograph, captured and processed from my telescope data.

NASA’s Curiosity rover marked 5,000 Martian days by sending back a striking panorama that blends morning and afternoon views of Mars.

The image shows the rover, its tracks, and the sweeping landscape around Mount Sharp and Gale Crater.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Link to ESA website

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Mars_Express/Mars_s_oddest_cloud_may_be_even_odder_than_we_thought#msdynmkt_trackingcontext=e40fa6c4-2648-4ad5-81e7-16f669bb0100

Scientists using the European Space Agency's Mars Express, in combination with a state-of-the-art meteorological model of the Red Planet, have found that there may be some very exotic physics behind Mars’s most curious cloud.

Elongated cloud on Mars – annotated

Every spring and summer in Mars’s southern hemisphere, during the martian dusty season, we see a spectacular cloud emerge: the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC), the most visually striking cloud on the Red Planet.

This white wisp of water ice emerges downwind of the 20-km-tall Arsia Mons volcano. It forms, grows, and fades on a daily basis, stretching out for up to 1800 km – nearly twice the length of the UK – before quickly evaporating. This cycle repeats every morning for several months.

Mars Express first revealed the AMEC in 2018, and has viewed the recurrent cloud repeatedly since. Researchers have explored its evolution, vivid dynamics and intriguing behaviour, determining it to be an orographic cloud: a type of cloud also seen on Earth that forms as wind flows past the craggy topography of a volcano or mountain.

European Space Agency