#APOD

[spacewonder19]

Christmas Tree Aurora ©

[silvereyedowl]

[source]

A Lucky Lunar Eclipse - April 3rd, 1996.

"The full Moon would normally washout the spectacle of Comet Hyakutake's lovely tail, even for those far from light polluted skies. Except that on the night of April 3rd, 1996, comet observers were in luck - the dance of the planets called for a total lunar eclipse! Lunar eclipses are caused when the Moon passes through the Earth's shadow. Although dimmed, the eclipsed Moon may not appear completely dark. Sunlight scattered into the Earth's shadow after passing around the planet's edge and through its dusty atmosphere can make the Moon take on dramatic shades of red during totality, as demonstrated in the above photo of the November, 1993 lunar eclipse. With the April lunar eclipse, totality began at 6:26 p.m. EST and lasted about an hour and a half. Weather permitting, the eclipse would have been visible for all those comet and Moon watchers lucky enough to be on the Earth's nightside."

[without-ado]

Storm cloud over Texas l Laura Rowe NASA APOD

[thefirststarr]

Why are these clouds multi-coloured? A relatively rare phenomenon in clouds known as iridescence can bring up unusual colours, or even a whole spectrum of colours simultaneously. These polar stratospheric clouds also, known as mother-of-pearl clouds, are formed of small water droplets of nearly uniform size. When the Sun is in the right position and, typically, hidden from direct view, these thin clouds can be seen significantly diffracting sunlight in a nearly coherent manner, with different colours being deflected by different amounts. Therefore, different colours will come to the observer from slightly different directions. Many clouds start with uniform regions that could show iridescence but quickly become too thick, too mixed, or too far from the Sun to exhibit striking colours. The featured image and an accompanying video were taken late in 2019 over Ostersund, Sweden.

Image Copyright: Image Credit: Goran Strand

[aeontriad]

M42: The Great Nebula in Orion

[lisamarieblair]

The Seagull Nebula

[nightskystories]

Dancing in the moonlight

[vibrantestvixen]

From NASA (Astronomy Picture of the Day - March 11, 2024)

What glows in the night? This night featured a combination of usual and unusual glows. Perhaps the most usual glow was from the Moon, a potentially familiar object. The full Moon's nearly vertical descent results from the observer being near Earth's equator. As the Moon sets, air and aerosols in Earth's atmosphere preferentially scatter out blue light, making the Sun-reflecting satellite appear reddish when near the horizon. Perhaps the most unusual glow was from the bioluminescent plankton, likely less familiar objects. These microscopic creatures glow blue, it is thought, primarily to surprise and deter predators. In this case, the glow was caused primarily by plankton-containing waves crashing onto the beach. The image was taken on Soneva Fushi Island, Maldives just over one year ago. Photographer credit: Petr Horalek

[sayxit]

Hula Hoop

[mizelaneus]

[coopergriggs]

[spacewonder19]

The Moon Dressed Like Saturn ©

[roversrovers]

Fresh Tiger Stripes on Saturn's Enceladus Image Credit: NASA, ESA, JPL, SSI, Cassini Imaging Team Explanation: Do underground oceans vent through canyons on Saturn's moon Enceladus? Long features dubbed tiger stripes are known to be spewing ice from the moon's icy interior into space, creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon's South Pole and creating Saturn's mysterious E-ring. Evidence for this has come from the robot Cassini spacecraft that orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017. Pictured here, a high resolution image of Enceladus is shown from a close flyby. The unusual surface features dubbed tiger stripes are visible in false-color blue. Why Enceladus is active remains a mystery, as the neighboring moon Mimas, approximately the same size, appears quite dead. An analysis of ejected ice grains has yielded evidence that complex organic molecules exist inside Enceladus. These large carbon-rich molecules bolster -- but do not prove -- that oceans under Enceladus' surface could contain life.

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is my favorite celestial object, the reason I got into space and science at all! As a child the idea that the subsurface oceans of Enceladus could potentially host alien life spurred my imagination and desire to learn all about it.

[without-ado]

Full Plankton Moon over Maldives l Petr Horálek via NASA APOD

[thefirststarr]

Sometimes, massive stars can blow bubbles. This image shows perhaps the most famous star-bubbles of all, NGC 7635, also known simply as The Bubble Nebula. Although it looks delicate, the 7-light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. To the top left of the Bubble's center is a hot, O-type star, several hundred thousand times more luminous and 45-times more massive than the Sun. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from that star has blasted out the structure of glowing gas in a surrounding molecular cloud. The intriguing Bubble Nebula and associated cloud complex lie 7,100 light-years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia. This sharp, tantalizing view of the cosmic bubble is a reprocessed composite of previously acquired Hubble Space Telescope image data.

Image Credit & Copyright: NASA/ESA/HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE

[aeontriad]

The Dark Tower in Scorpius