Amazing Space SnapShots!

cruz_phymalion

Jupiter's Great Red Spot
The Red Spot is the largest known storm in the solar system. With a diameter of 15,400 miles, it is almost twice the size of the entire Earth and one-sixth the diameter of Jupiter itself. However, the Red Spot does change its shape, size, and color, sometimes dramatically.

Image Credit: Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA/NASA/ESA) and Amy Simon (Cornell U.)

cruz_phymalion

Mars Up-Close
NASA's Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope took the picture on June 26, when Mars was approximately 43 million miles (68 million km) from Earth — the closest Mars has ever been to Earth since 1988. Hubble can see details as small as 10 miles (16 km) across. Frosty white water ice clouds and swirling orange dust storms above a vivid rusty landscape reveal Mars as a dynamic planet in this sharpest view ever obtained by an Earth-based telescope.
Image Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

cruz_phymalion

A Ring of Beauty
Here, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope turns its infrared array camera onto the Ring Nebula, which appears to be surrounded by intricate flower petals nestled in its outer shell. Its namesake ring is formed by a thick cylinder of gas and dust encircling the core star. The nebula sits about 2,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. One light-year is about 5.88 trillion miles (9.64 trillion kilometers). The image was released on February 11, 2005. This image was featured as our Image of the Day

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/J. Hora (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)


Very beautiful..Like a flower..

cruz_phymalion

An Unseen Explosion
While the event could not be seen directly from Earth – it occurred behind the Sun’s western limb from our perspective – photographer Gary Palmer tracked the resulting gas cloud that flung into space. Palmer used a SolarMax70 telescope to catch this view of the cloud on Feb. 20, 2005. This solar eruption, like all events on the Sun’s far-side as seen from Earth, did not affect our planet but was oriented toward Mars at the time. This image was featured as our Image of the Day

Image Credit: Gary Palmer, SolarMinimum.com

Is it solar flare?

cruz_phymalion

Cosmic Dust Bunnies
Surprisingly complex loops and blobs of cosmic dust lie hidden in the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 1316. This image was created on March 31, 2005, from data gathered by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and shows dust lanes and star clusters in this giant galaxy. Astronomers say these characteristics give a clue as to how this galaxy was formed. This image was featured as our Image of the Day

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team

I luv this image..Very enrapturing.

cruz_phymalion

The Eagle Nebula
For the 15th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists used the ACS, Hubble's newest camera, to record a new region of the eerie-looking Eagle Nebula, producing an image with stunning detail. The new Eagle Nebula image reveals a tall, dense tower of gas being sculpted by ultraviolet light from a group of massive, hot stars.
Image Credit: HUBBLESITE.org

Luv this one too..

cruz_phymalion

Arcs Tell The Tale Of A Giant Eruption
The arcs of multimillion-degree gas appear to be part of a projected ring 25,000 light years in diameter. The size and location of the ring indicate that it may have been produced in a titanic explosion that occurred about ten million years ago.
Image Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Karovska et al.

Subbahanallah

cruz_phymalion

SOHO Cool!
NOAA's Space Environment Center (SEC) has classified this flare from November 4, 2003 as an X28, making it in fact the strongest ever recorded.
Image Credit: SOHO/NASA/ESA


Solar flare..

cruz_phymalion

Aurora Australis
Red and green colors predominate in this view of the Aurora Australis photographed from the Space Shuttle in May 1991 at the peak of the last geomagnetic maximum. The payload bay and tail of the Shuttle can be seen on the left hand side of the picture.
Image Credit: NASA

Very amazing..{:2_71:}

cruz_phymalion

The Horsehead Nebula
The famous Horsehead Nebula sits amid the Orion molecular cloud complex. It's a protrusion at the edge of a larger region of dust. The dust obscures background stars, some of which light the fringes.
Image Credit: ESO

cruz_phymalion

Edge-On Galaxy
One of the universe's most stately and photogenic galaxies, the Sombrero galaxy, Messier 104 (M104) is a brilliant white, bulbous core encircled by the thick dust lanes comprising the spiral structure of the galaxy. As seen from Earth, the galaxy is tilted nearly edge-on. We view it from just six degrees north of its equatorial plane. This brilliant galaxy was named the Sombrero because of its resemblance to the broad rim and high-topped Mexican hat. The Hubble Heritage Team took these observations in May-June 2003 with the space telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys.
Image Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

cruz_phymalion

The Blue Marble
EarthKAM captured this image of Earth during the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. EarthKAM images are beamed into students' classrooms via the Internet mere hours after they are snapped.
Image Credit: EarthKAM

cruz_phymalion

What about this one..






Ants in Space
From ground-based telescopes, the so-called "ant nebula" (Menzel 3, or Mz 3) resembles the head and thorax of a garden-variety ant. This dramatic NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, showing 10 times more detail, reveals the "ant's" body as a pair of fiery lobes protruding from a dying, Sun-like star.
Image Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team

cruz_phymalion

A Parting Shot
This false color photograph of Neptune was made from Voyager 2 images taken through three filters: blue, green, and a filter that passes light at a wavelength that is absorbed by methane gas. Thus, regions that appear white or bright red are those that reflect sunlight before it passes through a large quantity of methane.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL

cruz_phymalion

Galactic Twin
What would our Milky Way galaxy look like if we could travel outside it and snap a picture? It might look a lot like a new image by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of a spiral galaxy called NGC 7331 - a virtual twin of our Milky Way. The picture shows our twin as never before. Its swirling arms spin outward from a central bulge of light, which is outlined by a ring of actively forming stars.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI

cruz_phymalion

Crowning Jewel
Resembling a nightmarish beast rearing its head from a crimson sea, this celestial object is actually just a pillar of gas and dust. Called the Cone Nebula (in NGC 2264) - so named because in ground-based images it has a conical shape - this monstrous pillar resides in a turbulent star-forming region. This picture, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, on May 11, 2002, shows the upper 2.5 light-years of the Cone, a height that equals 23 million roundtrips to the Moon. The entire pillar is seven light-years long.
Image Credit: NASA, Holland Ford (JHU), the ACS Science Team and ESA

cruz_phymalion

The X-Ray Glint In The Cat's Eye
This composite image of Chandra and Hubble Space Telescope data offers astronomers an opportunity to compare where the hotter, X-ray emitting gas appears in relation to the cooler material seen in optical wavelengths. The Chandra team found that the chemical abundances in the region of hot gas were like those in the wind from the central star and different from the outer cooler material. Although still incredibly energetic and hot enough to radiate X rays, Chandra shows the hot gas to be somewhat cooler than scientists would have expected for such a system.
Image Credit: NASA/UIUC/Y.Chu et al., Optical: NASA/HST

cruz_phymalion

Sunspot Loops
Even a relatively quiet day on the Sun is busy. This ultraviolet image shows bright, glowing arcs of gas flowing around the sunspots.
Image Credit: NASA

cruz_phymalion

Eclipsed!
On February 26th, 1998 the island of Aruba fell under the umbral shadow of the moon producing one of nature's greatest spectacles -- a total eclipse of the sun. The event occurs when the moon passes directly between Earth and the sun, blocking our view of the solar disk.
Tom Rankin

cruz_phymalion

Space Phenomenon Imitates Art
This image resembling Vincent van Gogh's painting, "Starry Night," is an expanding halo of light around a distant star, named V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon). This Hubble Telescope image was obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on February 8, 2004.
Image Credit: NASA, Hubble Heritage Team