The Week's Coolest Space Images
A Celestial Ring (Header Image)
Glimmering with colour and light against a pitch-black sky, this ring was seen during the eclipse that took place on 21 August 2017 across the USA. This event was a total solar eclipse, meaning that the Moon slipped perfectly in front of the Sun and blocked the entirety of the star's light – an occurrence known as totality – for a band of observers across the country.
Some Tea With Your River, Sir?
When the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this image of Rupert Bay on July 30, 2016, tannin-stained (dark brown) river water was flowing into the bay at the same time that turbid seawater appeared to be pushing in due to the rising tide.
A Song Of Ice And Light
Saturn's moon Enceladus drifts before the rings and the tiny moon Pandora in this view captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on Nov. 1, 2009. The entire scene is backlit by the Sun, providing striking illumination for the icy particles that make up both the rings and the jets emanating from the south pole of Enceladus.
An Eruption In Iceland
As an island in the moist, atmospherically turbulent North Atlantic, Iceland is often shrouded in cloud cover and hard to observe from space. And lately, the island is making some of its own cloud cover, as the Earth has split open between the Bardarbunga and Askja volcanoes and spewed lava and hot gas.
A Lonely Galaxy
Roughly 50 million light-years away lies a somewhat overlooked little galaxy named NGC 1559. Pictured here by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, this barred spiral lies in the little-observed southern constellation of Reticulum (The Reticule).
The Earth And Moon From Afar
As part of an engineering test, NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft captured this image of the Earth and Moon using its NavCam1 imager on January 17 from a distance of 39.5 million miles (63.6 million km)… Earth is the largest, brightest spot in the center of the image, with the smaller, dimmer Moon appearing to the right.