Some of the most beautiful images are the simplest, including this week's photo of the Earth and Moon. Plus a high-resolution picture of the Sun's surface, featuring detailed cells of plasma. Then there is the amazing catalog of images from Hubble and JWST, giving us glimpses into the wider universe.
Credit: ESA/Juice/JANUS; Acknowledgments: Livio Agostini
Monday, 15 September 2025
This photograph of Earth and the Moon was taken by the JANUS camera onboard ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice). It was taken on September 9, 2024, as Juice sailed off towards Venus following its lunar-Earth flyby. At the time, it was 5.7 million kilometers away from Earth and 5.3 million kilometers from the Moon.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
Tuesday, 16 September 2025
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured this sparkling scene of star birth in an image released on Sept. 4, 2025. Called Pismis 24, this young star cluster resides in the core of the nearby Lobster Nebula, approximately 5,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Scorpius. Home to a vibrant stellar nursery and one of the closest sites of massive star birth, Pismis 24 provides rare insight into large and massive stars. Its proximity makes this region one of the best places to explore the properties of hot young stars and how they evolve.
Captured in infrared light by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), this image reveals thousands of jewel-like stars of varying sizes and colors. The largest and most brilliant ones with the six-point diffraction spikes are the most massive stars in the cluster. Hundreds to thousands of smaller members of the cluster appear as white, yellow, and red, depending on their stellar type and the amount of dust enshrouding them. Webb also shows us tens of thousands of stars behind the cluster that are part of the Milky Way galaxy.
Credit: Inouye Solar Telescope, National Solar Observatory (NSO), AURA, NSF
Wednesday, 17 September 2025
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has captured the highest-resolution image of the Sun's surface ever recorded. The image, produced by the National Solar Observatory (NSO), reveals a turbulent, "boiling" pattern of gas covering our star. The "boiling" appearance consists of cell-like structures, each approximately the size of Texas, which are formed by convective currents that move heat from the Sun's interior to its surface. Hot plasma rises in the center of the cells and sinks in the dark lanes at the edges. Tiny, bright markers of magnetic fields are visible in the dark lanes. It is thought that these specks of light funnel energy into the corona, the Sun's outer atmosphere, which could explain its high temperature. This image was part of the Inouye Solar Telescope's first-light observations, and its high resolution allows for the viewing of features as small as 30 kilometers for the first time.
Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)/Hubble-Europe (ESA) Collaboration, D. Padgett (GSFC), T. Megeath (University of Toledo), and B. Reipurth (University of Hawaii)
Thursday, 18 September 2025
Lying inside our home galaxy, the Milky Way, this Herbig–Haro object is a turbulent birthing ground for new stars in a region known as the Orion B molecular cloud complex, located 1,350 light-years away.
Herbig–Haro (HH) objects are bright patches of nebulosity associated with newborn stars that form when narrow jets of partially ionized gas ejected by stars collide with nearby clouds of gas and dust. This image of Herbig-Haro Jet HH 24 was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2015.
When stars form within giant clouds of cool molecular hydrogen, some of the surrounding material collapses under gravity to create a rotating, flattened disk encircling the newborn star.
Although planets will later congeal in the disk, at this early stage, the protostar is feeding on the disk with a voracious appetite. Gas from the disk rains down onto the protostar and engorges it. Superheated material spills away and is shot outward from the star in opposite directions along an uncluttered escape route – the star's rotation axis.
Shock fronts develop along the jets, heating the surrounding gas to thousands of degrees Fahrenheit. The jets collide with the surrounding gas and dust, clearing vast spaces, much like a stream of water plowing into a hill of sand.
Credit: STScI, NASA, and Jon Morse
Friday, 19 September 2025
A huge, billowing pair of gas and dust clouds is captured in this stunning NASA Hubble Space Telescope image of the supermassive star Eta Carinae.
Eta Carinae was observed by Hubble in September 1995 with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). Images taken through red and near-ultraviolet filters were subsequently combined to produce the color image shown.
Eta Carinae was the site of a giant outburst about 150 years ago, when it became one of the brightest stars in the southern sky. Though the star released as much visible light as a supernova explosion, it survived the outburst. Somehow, the explosion produced two polar lobes and a large, thin equatorial disk, all of which were moving outward at approximately 1.5 million miles per hour.
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