Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI, J. DePasquale (STScI)
Monday, 12 January 2026
The protostar L1527, shown in this image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, is embedded within a cloud of material that is feeding its growth. Material ejected from the star has cleared out cavities above and below it, whose boundaries glow orange and blue in this infrared view. The upper central region displays bubble-like shapes due to stellar ‘burps,’ or sporadic ejections. Webb also detects filaments made of molecular hydrogen that has been shocked by past stellar ejections. Intriguingly, the edges of the cavities at upper left and lower right appear straight, while the boundaries at upper right and lower left are curved. The region at lower right appears blue, as there’s less dust between it and Webb than the orange regions above it.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Kevin M. Gill
Tuesday, 13 January 2026
Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Neptune in 1989, flying by 4,950 km above its cloud tops. It is still the only spacecraft to have visited the planet! The mission revealed 6 new moons, rings, and geysers erupting from the moon Triton. This Voyager 2 image of Neptune, processed by Kevin Gill, was captured on Aug. 31, 1989.
Credit: NASA/Nichole Ayers
Wednesday, 14 January 2026
NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers captured this image of lightning while orbiting aboard the International Space Station more than 250 miles above Milan, Italy, on July 1, 2025. Storm observations from the space station help scientists study Earth’s upper atmosphere, which can improve weather models and protect communication systems and aircraft. Space station crew take photographs of Earth that record how the planet changes over time due to human activity and natural events. This record allows scientists to monitor disasters and direct on-the-ground response, as well as study phenomena.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Thursday, 15 January 2026
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its Mastcam-Z camera system to capture this view of a location nicknamed “Mont Musard” on Sept. 8, 2025, the 1,618th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. This view also captures another region, “Lac de Charmes,” where the rover’s team will be looking for more rock core samples to collect in the year ahead. Mars’ atmospheric dust was particularly low at the time the imagery was collected, providing a clear view of mountains 52 miles (84 kilometers) away.
This natural-color mosaic is made from three separate images, each acquired using all of Mastcam-Z’s filters to provide color and allow scientists to assess the diversity of minerals before driving into this terrain.
Credit: NASA, ESA. G. Anand (STScI), and A. Benitez-Llambay (Univ. of Milan-Bicocca); Image processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)
Friday, 16 January 2026
This image shows the location of Cloud-9, which is 14 million light-years from Earth. The diffuse magenta is radio data from the ground-based Very Large Array (VLA) showing the presence of the cloud. The dashed circle marks the peak of radio emission, which is where researchers focused their search for stars. Follow-up observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys found no stars within the cloud. The few objects that appear within its boundaries are background galaxies. Before the Hubble observations, scientists could argue that Cloud-9 is a faint dwarf galaxy whose stars could not be seen with ground-based telescopes because of their limited sensitivity. Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys shows that, in reality, the failed galaxy contains no stars.
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