The Best Space Photos Of The Month
As we tediously while away our days down here on Earth, satellites are zooming through space, snapping incredible pictures of Earth, the solar system and outer space. Here are the highlights from September.
This photo isn't from a satellite, but we couldn't leave it out: A composite view of the rare super blood moon phenomenon, which took place on Sunday, September 27th.
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, recently past the halfway mark of his one-year mission to the International Space Station, photographed the Nile River during a nighttime flyover on Sept. 22, 2015.
The image combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging Camera (MVIC). Pluto's surface sports a remarkable range of subtle colors, enhanced in this view to a rainbow of pale blues, yellows, oranges, and deep reds. Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a complex geological and climatological story that scientists have only just begun to decode
The arrangement of the spiral arms in the galaxy Messier 63, seen here in an image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, recall the pattern at the center of a sunflower. So the nickname for this cosmic object — the Sunflower Galaxy — is no coincidence.
The edge of Earth, visible near the top of the frame, appears fuzzy because Earth's atmosphere blocks different amounts of light at different altitudes. On the left, the moon's edge is perfectly crisp, because it has no atmosphere. This image was taken in extreme ultraviolet wavelengths of 171 angstroms. Though this light is invisible to our eyes, it is typically colorized in gold.
This Sentinel-2A false colour image shows agricultural structures in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. The varying shades of red and other colours across the entire image indicate how sensitive the satellite's multispectral camera is to differences in vegetation cover and chlorophyll content. This is used to provide key information on plant health.
The aurora, as photographed from the International Space Station by ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen.
