Ten breathtaking Astronomy photos you should see right now (November 2024)

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day is a huge collection of astronomical images, both amateur and professional.  It celebrates our amazing universe every day.

Since its inception in 1995, NASA APOD has been selecting and publishing some of the best images of space. Its two editors, Robert Nemiroff and Jerry Bonnell, are the people behind it. Here, you can see images taken with space telescopes like Hubble, JWST etc. But it also includes amateur images taken with regular DSLR cameras.

Here are some of the best images from November 2024.

Saturn at Night

In the night sky of Earth, Saturn shines dazzling. At star parties, telescopic views of the outer gas giant planet and its stunning rings frequently make it a star. However, telescopes near Earth just cannot provide this breathtaking image of Saturn’s rings and night side. They can only reveal Saturn’s day side when looking out from the inner Solar System. The Cassini spacecraft took this picture of Saturn’s narrow, bright crescent with the shadow of night falling over its vast, intricate ring system. Cassini, a robot spacecraft from Earth, spent 13 years orbiting Saturn before being ordered to enter the gas giant’s atmosphere on September 15, 2017. Just two days before its big final plunge, Cassini’s wide-angle camera captured the pictures that make up this amazing mosaic. We won’t see Saturn’s night again until another Earthly spaceship calls.

Jupiter Abyss

What is Jupiter’s black spot? Nobody knows for sure. NASA’s Juno robotic spacecraft captured an image of the Abyss, a typically dark cloud region, during one trip over Jupiter. The Abyss appears to be in the centre of a vortex based on the surrounding cloud patterns. The Abyss may indeed be the deep hole it looks to be since black features on Jupiter’s atmosphere often run deeper than light ones. However, this is only speculation in the absence of other proof. A network of winding clouds and other whirling storm systems around the Abyss, some of which are topped by high-altitude, light-coloured clouds. When the highlighted photograph was taken in 2019, Juno was just 15,000 km above Jupiter’s clouds.

M42: The great nebula in Orion

Perhaps the most well-known astronomical nebulae is the Great Nebula in Orion, a massive, close-by star birth zone. Just 1500 light-years distant, bright newborn stars are surrounded by incandescent gas at the edge of a massive interstellar molecular cloud. Wisps and sheets of dust and gas are especially visible in the deep picture, which is accentuated by the emission of hydrogen and oxygen in the designated colours. With the naked eye, the Great Nebula in Orion may be located close to the recognisable belt of three stars in the well-known constellation. The Orion Nebula is home to several stellar nurseries and the Trapezium, a luminous open cluster of stars. Proplyds, hot young stars, a lot of hydrogen gas, and stellar jets that eject material quickly are all found in these nurseries. The Orion Nebula, sometimes called M42, is situated in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun and extends across approximately 40 light years.

Milky Way over Easter Island

Why were Easter Island sculptures constructed? Nobody knows for sure. There are undoubtedly more than 900 massive stone figures known as moais there. On average, the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) moais are more than twice as tall and more than 200 times as heavy as humans. The unique statues are believed to have been made some 600 years ago, depicting the leaders of a thriving and old civilisation. UNESCO has designated Rapa Nui as a World Heritage Site. Here are some of the stone giants photographed in October beneath our Milky Way galaxy’s centre ring. Moais that were previously unknown are continuously being found.

Neptune at night

In the night sky, the ice giant Neptune is not very visible. Telescopes are required to see the dull and far-off Planet, which is around 30 times further from the Sun than our lovely globe. However, telescopes near Earth cannot capture this spectacular image of Neptune’s night. Only the day side of Neptune can be seen from the inner solar system. Voyager 2 took this nightside photo of Neptune, showing its thin crescent near to the crescent of its big moon Triton. As the robotic spacecraft continued its journey to interstellar space, the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which had been launched from Earth in 1977, flew close by the outermost planet of the Solar System in 1989 while gazing back at Neptune at night.

Valles Marineris: The Grand Canyon of Mars

The face of Mars is slashed by the most incredible canyon in the Solar System. The enormous valley, known as Valles Marineris, is more than 3,000 kilometres long, 600 km wide, and 8 kilometres deep. In contrast, Arizona’s Grand Canyon is 800 kilometres long, 30 km wide, and 1.8 kilometres deep. Although a prominent theory is that the Valles Marineris began as a fracture when the planet cooled billions of years ago, its exact origin is still unclear. In the canyon, several geologic processes have been found. More than 100 photos of Mars taken by Viking Orbiters in the 1970s were used to create the featured mosaic.

Pluto at Night

This dark picture stretches over Pluto’s night side. In this breathtaking space-based view, the Sun lies 4.9 billion kilometres (almost 4.5 light-hours) behind the dark and far-off Earth. It was photographed by distant New Horizons in July 2015, around 19 minutes after Pluto’s closest approach, when the probe was about 21,000 km away. In addition to showing Pluto’s fragile, unexpectedly intricate layers of hazy atmosphere, the image also shows a stunning silhouette of a Kuiper Belt denizen. The crescent twilight scene towards the top of the frame features rough water-ice mountains in the Norgay Montes and southern regions of nitrogen-ice plains, which are now officially known as Sputnik Planitia.

The Medusa nebula

This nebula’s common name, The Medusa Nebula, is suggested by its braided and serpentine strands of incandescent gas. Medusa, sometimes called Abell 21, is an ancient planetary nebula located in the constellation Gemini, about 1,500 light-years distant. Like its legendary namesake, the nebula is linked to a significant metamorphosis. As low-mass stars like the sun go from red giants to hot white dwarfs and shed their outer layers, they reach a final stage in their evolution known as the planetary nebula phase. The blazing star’s ultraviolet radiation powers the nebular light. The dim star close to the centre of the brilliant crescent shape is the changing star of Medusa. It is evident that fainter filaments stretch to the left and down in this deep telescopic view. It is thought that the Medusa Nebula is more than four light-years wide.

Interplanetary Earth

On July 19, 2013, Earth was imaged simultaneously from the innermost planet Mercury and the ringed gas giant Saturn, marking an interplanetary first. The robotic Cassini probe, which circled the outermost gas giant, obtained the image of Earth on the left, which is the light blue dot directly below Saturn’s rings. People throughout the world took a lot of their photos of Saturn on that same day. On the right, the sunward MESSENGER spacecraft caught the Earth-Moon system in Mercury orbit against the black background of space. MESSENGER captured the photograph as part of an effort to find Mercury’s tiny, naturally occurring satellites, which should be pretty faint moons. The brighter Earth and Moon are both overexposed and gleam brilliantly with reflected sunlight in the MESSENGER photograph. Both Cassini and MESSENGER have subsequently retired from their Solar System exploratory missions, having been destined to never return to their home Earth.

NGC 206 and the Star Clouds of Andromeda

Nestled among the dusty arms of the nearby Andromeda galaxy, along with the pinkish star-forming areas of the galaxy, lies the enormous stellar association known as NGC 206. The spiral galaxy, also called M31, is only 2.5 million light-years distant. This close-up of the southwestern portion of Andromeda’s disc is crisp and detailed, with NGC 206 in its centre. NGC 206 is young, as seen by its brilliant blue stars. Its youngest big stars are younger than 10 million years. NGC 206 is around 4,000 light-years in size, far bigger than the open or galactic clusters of young stars in our Milky Way galaxy’s disc. That is almost the same size as the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud and the vast stellar nursery NGC 604 in the neighbouring spiral M33.

If you have a space image, you can submit it to NASA APOD too.

Clear skies!