Barbados Caribbean Cloudscape By Mike Toy

Venezuela by Jonas Piontek

Here’s the orbital period of our solar system’s 8 major planets (how long it takes each to travel around the sun). Their size is to scale and their speed is accurate relative to Earth’s. The repetition of each GIF is proportional to their orbital period. Mercury takes less than 3 months to zoom around Sol, Neptune takes nearly 165 years.  

Clouds cast thousand-mile shadows into space when viewed aboard the International Space Station

In this 2 part series, Planet X will teach you about the formation of donut planets using the power of physics! 

http://io9.gizmodo.com/what-would-the-earth-be-like-if-it-was-the-shape-of-a-d-1515700296

NGC 1999

Just south of the Orion nebula is a dense area of dust and gas forming stars, in fact, the first Herbig-Haro stars were located here, protostars pushing intense beams of matter out at the poles.

The mystery is the black blob in the white region, a reflective nebula from the star V380 Ori, but what is the dark patch ?

Originally it was thought to be a dense dark cloud of dust, hiding the light, however further analysis has found it is indeed a hole, made to look black in contrast to the bright reflective surroundings.

A Multi-Camera 360° Panoramic Timelapse of the Stars by Vincent Brady [VIDEO]

The Einstein Cross Gravitational Lens : Most galaxies have a single nucleus – does this galaxy have four? The strange answer leads astronomers to conclude that the nucleus of the surrounding galaxy is not even visible in this image. The central cloverleaf is rather light emitted from a background quasar. The gravitational field of the visible foreground galaxy breaks light from this distant quasar into four distinct images. The quasar must be properly aligned behind the center of a massive galaxy for a mirage like this to be evident. The general effect is known as gravitational lensing, and this specific case is known as the Einstein Cross. Stranger still, the images of the Einstein Cross vary in relative brightness, enhanced occasionally by the additional gravitational microlensing effect of specific stars in the foreground galaxy. via NASA

12072022: Edge of the Carina Nebula | First Images from The James Webb Space Telescope. Photography credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

Making a Spectacle of Star Formation in Orion

Looking like a pair of eyeglasses only a rock star would wear, this nebula brings into focus a murky region of star formation. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope exposes the depths of this dusty nebula with its infrared vision, showing stellar infants that are lost behind dark clouds when viewed in visible light.

Best known as Messier 78, the two round greenish nebulae are actually cavities carved out of the surrounding dark dust clouds. The extended dust is mostly dark, even to Spitzer’s view, but the edges show up in mid-wavelength infrared light as glowing, red frames surrounding the bright interiors. Messier 78 is easily seen in small telescopes in the constellation of Orion, just to the northeast of Orion’s belt, but looks strikingly different, with dominant, dark swaths of dust. Spitzer’s infrared eyes penetrate this dust, revealing the glowing interior of the nebulae.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Spitzer