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Western Australia’s Kimberley region is featured in this double view from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission.
The area pictured is part of Kimberley’s western coastline along the Indian Ocean. The large inlet on the left is King Sound – a gulf measuring about 120 km long and 50 km wide. King Sound has the highest tides in Australia, and amongst the highest in the world, reaching a maximum range of around 11 to 12 m.
Several rivers empty their muddy and sediment-laden waters into the sound. Among these, the Fitzroy River, flowing from the bottom centre of the image, is one of Australia’s largest watercourses. The port town of Derby lies near the mouth of this river on the western shore of the smaller peninsula jutting out into the sound.
Acquired in December 2025, this view is in natural colour, as the human eye would see the area.
A myriad of mangrove estuaries are scattered around the coast, which in the natural colour image are partially concealed within the large expanses of tidal mud flats. This view allows the mangroves to be easily distinguished as they appear in neon green, which indicates how dense and vital the mangrove forests are. This is particularly important, as mangroves contribute many environmental benefits to coastal and estuary ecosystems and protect the coastline from erosion.
Owing to the presence of sediment carried by river discharge, the water in King Sound appears brownish in the natural colour image, also suggesting shallow water. In false colours, the water shows up in black and blue hues, which reveal deep water with blue denoting a higher concentration of sediment on the surface.
The hinterland visible in the images is a transition zone where grasslands gradually give way to the arid deserts further south in Australia’s vast and remote interior. In natural colours, the landscape is dominated by sparse green vegetation and the deep ochre and rusty red of the soil – this is known as pindan soil, which is rich in iron oxides and is typically found in the south-western Kimberley region.
In this view, the natural red of the soil can sometimes hide burn scars, while in the false-colour image they are clearly visible as dark patches on the land. The ability to identify areas burnt by wildfires is a valuable resource in regions such as this one, prone to fires, as it allows authorities to better track the frequency of fires, map the extent of the burned areas and evaluate the impact on the surrounding environment.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2025), processed by ESA; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Apilado de 250 fotos.Pasos de 0,007 mm. Ampliación 10x
CANON EOS 1000D - Objetivo Nikon BD Plan 10x- 0.25 210/0 - 0,7" - ISO100
The support for our launch was outstanding, and I want to thank each of you for the #GoodLuckTim messages. From the schoolchildren who watched the launch in class, people watching on the underground, and viewers outside of UK, your messages have shown how much interest there is in space and they mean a great deal to me. A big thank you to those who attended launch celebrations up and down the country and especially the school kids who attended the event at the Science Museum. We are very busy up here but I promise to start sharing more of our life in space soon.
Credits: ESA/NASA
122F0627
iss068e007434 (Oct. 2, 2022) --- Carteret Atoll, part of the independent nation of Papua New Guinea, is pictured from the International Space Station as it orbited 260 miles above the southwestern Pacific Ocean. Credit: ESA/Samantha Cristoforetti
The sparkling spiral galaxy gracing this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week is UGC 5460, which sits about 60 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major. This image combines four different wavelengths of light to reveal UGC 5460’s central bar of stars, winding spiral arms and bright blue star clusters. Also captured in the upper left-hand corner of this image is a far closer object: a star just 577 light-years away in our own galaxy.
UGC 5460 has hosted two recent supernovae named SN 2011ht and SN 2015as. It’s because of these two stellar explosions that Hubble targeted this galaxy, collecting data for three observing programmes that aim to study various kinds of supernovae.
SN 2015as was what’s known as a core-collapse supernova: a cataclysmic explosion that happens when the core of a star far more massive than the Sun runs out of fuel and collapses under its own gravity, initiating a rebound of material outside the core. Hubble observations of SN 2015as will help researchers understand what happens when the expanding shockwave of a supernova collides with the gas that surrounds the exploded star.
SN 2011ht might have been a core-collapse supernova as well, but it could also be an impostor called a luminous blue variable. Luminous blue variables are rare stars that experience eruptions so large that they can mimic supernovae. Crucially, luminous blue variables emerge from these eruptions unscathed, while stars that go supernova do not. Hubble will search for a stellar survivor at SN 2011ht’s location, and the explosion’s identity may be revealed at last.
[Image Description: A spiral galaxy seen close to face-on. The centre of its disc is a bright, pale yellowish oval shape. Spiral arms extend from either side of the oval through the disc on irregular paths. They are marked throughout by bright bluish-white patches of stars. Distant background galaxies appear as small orangish blobs around the spiral galaxy. In the top-left corner a nearby star shines brightly, spikes radiating from it.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, W. Jacobson-Galán, A. Filippenko, J. Mauerhan; CC BY 4.0
Siempre asfixia.
________
That damn routine...
Always suffocating.
________
"I believe I can see the future, because I repeat the same routine" - Everyday is exactly the same
Esa tarde parecía que el cielo se nos venía encima. El atardecer teñia todo de rojo y las negras nubes comenzaban a destellar relampagos. Solo tuve que ir a la ventana y tomar la imagen que miraba hacia la ciudad de San Luis. "Red rain is coming down..." cantaba Peter Gabriel. /
That afternoon it seemed that the sky was above us. The evening had all the red and black clouds began to flash lightning. I only had to go to the window and take the picture looking towards the town of San Luis. "Red rain is coming down ..."
Peter Gabriel sang.
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GLS Nikon D300 / Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8 DC Macro HSM
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This new picture from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope reveals intricate details of the Herbig Haro object 797 (HH 797). Herbig-Haro objects are luminous regions surrounding newborn stars (known as protostars), and are formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from these newborn stars form shockwaves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speeds. HH 797, which dominates the lower half of this image, is located close to the young open star cluster IC 348, which is located near the eastern edge of the Perseus dark cloud complex. The bright infrared objects in the upper portion of the image are thought to host two further protostars.
Image credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, T. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)
#NASA #STScI #jwst #jameswebbspacetelescope #NASAGoddard #NASAMarshall #astrophysics #space
This view was generated from the digital terrain model and the nadir and colour channels of the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express.
It shows a bird’s-eye view of a crater lying in Mars’s ancient southern highlands, located just next to a far larger basin named Trouvelot Crater. It shows dark, volcanic deposits covering the crater floor and wall. The crater measures around 30 km across.
[Image description: A close-up, angled view of a Martian crater. The large circular crater dominates the scene, with steep, shadowed inner walls and a smooth, sandy-looking floor. The surrounding terrain is pale reddish-brown and gently sloping, dotted with a few smaller craters. The lighting highlights the rugged edges of the main crater against the otherwise smooth landscape.]
Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
In this black and white infrared image, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's Crew Dragon spacecraft is launched on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-3 mission to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn, Kayla Barron, and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Matthias Maurer onboard, Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2021, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA’s SpaceX Crew-3 mission is the third crew rotation mission of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. Chari, Marshburn, Barron, Maurer launched at 9:03 p.m. EST from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center to begin a six month mission onboard the orbital outpost. Photo Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky)
The spiral galaxy UGC 11860 seems to float serenely against a field of background galaxies in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. UGC 11860 lies around 184 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus, and its untroubled appearance is deceiving; this galaxy recently played host to an almost unimaginably energetic stellar explosion.
A supernova explosion – the catastrophically violent end of a massive star’s life – was detected in UGC 11860 in 2014. Astronomers used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 to search through the aftermath and analyze the lingering remnants of this vast cosmic explosion.
One team explored UGC 11860 to understand more about the star systems that eventually meet their demise in supernovae. The hugely energetic processes during supernova explosions are predominantly responsible for forging the elements between silicon and nickel on the periodic table. This means that understanding the influence of the masses and compositions of the progenitor star systems is vital to explaining how many of the chemical elements here on Earth originated.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Filippenko, J. D. Lyman
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2023/hubble-observes-a...
der Storch ist der *inoffzielle Wappenvogel* des Elsaß --- lange Zeit war er vor dem Aussterben bedroht --- jetzt sieht man ihn wieder fast in jedem kleinen Winzerort ---
noch am 10. Oktober 2008 hörte ich einen Weißstorch auf dem Dach eines Hauses neben der Kirche in Eguisheim *klappern*.
ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti is working on the "PArticle STAbilised Emulsions & Foams" (PASTA) experiment in the ISS Fluid Science Laboratory, which studies the development of bubbles in emulsions. Samples were removed & packed for return & samples for the new FOAM experiment are installed.
ID: 527E5053
Credit: ESA/NASA
This is a version of the ESA logo like no other: seen through a microscope it measures just over 17 thousandths of a millimetre across, about half the diameter of the average human skin cell.
The logo was carved out of a piece of nickel-based space-grade alloy Inconel using Xenon atoms shot from a plasma ion beam.
While the logo measures 17.43 micrometres (thousandths of a millimetre) in length it is just 700 nanometres (millionths of a millimetre) deep. Click here for an angled view.
“The logo was blasted out of a polished Inconel surface,” explains ESA Young Graduate Trainee Felix Schmidt, serving in ESA’s Materials and Electrical Components Laboratory.
“We created it as practice, in preparation for a project on modelling micromechanical testing. Achieving accurate cuts on a given material is tricky, with many parameters needing to be optimised to get the correct size and depth of the geometry, but this logo shows the kind of accuracy we can reach.”
To get an idea of its actual size, see the logo beside a human hair in this microscopic view – created using stacks of visible light microscope images to achieve the depth of field to get both objects in focus at once.
Felix adds: “Next the plan is to cut out a pillar of metal, then crush it using a nano-indenter, having meanwhile created a high-fidelity ‘digital twin’ of the pillar to accurately model how it behaves as force is exerted on it.”
ESA is already active at creating ‘digital twins’ of space systems at higher scales, explains engineer Michael Mallon, working on digital spacecraft design and verification, “but our aim here is to demonstrate a predictive capability right down to the meso-scale, the next level up from atoms.”
Credits: ESA-F. Schmidt
Featured in this new image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope is Messier 106, also known as NGC 4258. This is a nearby spiral galaxy that resides roughly 23 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici, practically a neighbour by cosmic standards. Messier 106 is one of the brightest and nearest spiral galaxies to our own and two supernovae have been observed in this galaxy in 1981 and 2014.
At its heart, as in most spiral galaxies, is a supermassive black hole, but this one is particularly active. Unlike the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, which pulls in wisps of gas only occasionally, Messier 106’s black hole is actively gobbling up material. As the gas spirals towards the black hole, it heats up and emits powerful radiation.
This image was captured with Webb’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam). This observation was taken as part of a dedicated programme to study the galaxy’s active galactic nucleus, the galaxy’s bright central region that is dominated by the light emitted by dust and gas as it falls into the black hole. The blue regions in this image reflect stellar distribution throughout the central region of the galaxy. The orange regions indicate warmer dust and the stronger red hues represent colder dust. The teal, green and yellow tones near the centre of the image depict varying gas distributions throughout the region.
The galaxy has a remarkable feature – it is known to have two ‘anomalous’ extra arms visible in radio and X-ray wavelengths, rather than in the visible. Unlike the normal arms, these are composed of hot gas instead of stars. Astronomers believe these extra arms result from the black hole’s activity, a feedback effect seen in other galaxies as well. They are likely caused by outflowing material produced by the violent churning of gas around the black hole, creating a phenomenon analogous to a wave crashing up out of the ocean when it hits a rock near the shore.
Despite carrying his name, Messier 106 was neither discovered nor catalogued by the renowned 18th century astronomer Charles Messier. Discovered by his assistant, Pierre Méchain, the galaxy was never added to the catalogue in his lifetime. Along with six other objects discovered but not logged by the pair, Messier 106 was posthumously added to the Messier catalogue in the 20th century.
[Image Description: The central region of a spiral galaxy. Its core is a small bright point radiating bright, bluish-white light over the scene. The white light is diffuse and many point-like stars in the galaxy (and even background galaxies) can be seen through it. The galaxy’s arms can be seen as broad, swirling streaks of glowing gas and dust, coloured red and orange. Two additional arms are revealed in green.]
Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. Glenn; CC BY 4.0
ESA astronaut Tim Peake, NASA astronaut Tim Kopra and commander Yuri Malenchenko landed in the steppe of Kazakhstan on Saturday, 18 June in their Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft. The trio spent 186 days on the International Space Station.
The landing brings Tim Peake’s Principia mission to an end but the research continues. Tim is the eighth ESA astronaut to complete a long-duration mission in space. He is the third after Alexander Gerst and Andreas Mogensen to fly directly to ESA’s astronaut home base in Cologne, Germany, for medical checks and for researchers to collect more data on how Tim’s body and mind have adapted to living in space.
Follow Tim Peake via timpeake.esa.int/
Credit: ESA–Stephane Corvaja
Trasnochadores a más no poder, están viviendo la vida al revés: Caen rendidos cuando sale el sol y ¿Quién los levanta? ¿Viste esas noches cuando no das más y el cuerpo empieza a pedir por favor? (ya no hay faso, ni beso, ni alcohol para consolarte) ¿Y sin embargo, vos te quedás abrazadita a esa copa sensual? ¡Como que todo va llegando tarde a tu mundo remoto!... Por no estar ahí tu amor perdí igual puedo jugar al porno star...
NASA astronaut Robert Hines is helped out of the SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft onboard the SpaceX recovery ship Megan after he, NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren, NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, landed in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, Friday, Oct. 14, 2022. Lindgren, Hines, Watkins, and Cristoforetti are returning after 170 days in space as part of Expeditions 67 and 68 aboard the International Space Station. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
This Copernicus Sentinel-2 image captures the borders between North and South Dakota and Minnesota blanketed with snow and ice.
This area is part of the Red River Valley, one of the most fertile river valleys in the world. This is clearly visible in the image, where the left side is dominated by a vast expanse of agricultural fields. Their geometric patterns can be seen in shades of brown, or white where they are blanketed with snow.
Agriculture, which includes soybeans, corn, wheat and sugar beets, plays a key role in the local economy.
Formed by the confluence of the Bois de Sioux River from the south and the Otter Tail River from the west, the winding course of the Red River of the North can be seen in white across the image. The river flows for over 700 km northwards, marking the border between North Dakota (left) and Minnesota (right).
Visible in white where the two rivers meet, the twin cities of Wahpeton, North Dakota, and Breckenridge, Minnesota, lie on opposite sides of the Red River of the North. Wahpeton is just 75 km south of Fargo, making this snowy territory familiar to fans of the Fargo film and series.
On the right, the image features a blend of agricultural fields, wetlands and small lakes, that appear to be fully or partially frozen. The largest feature here is the Otter Tail Lake, covering about 55 sq km.
Sentinel-2 delivers imagery and data needed for Europe’s environmental Copernicus programme. Data are used for a wide range of applications, including monitoring land use and changes, land management, agriculture, forestry and natural disasters (floods, forest fires, landslides and erosion).
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2025), processed by ESA; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The Soyuz MS-05 spacecraft is seen as it lands with Expedition 53 Commander Randy Bresnik of NASA and Flight Engineers Paolo Nespoli of ESA (European Space Agency) and Sergey Ryazanskiy of the Russian space agency Roscosmos near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan on Thursday, Dec. 14, 2017. Bresnik, Nespoli and Ryazanskiy are returning after 139 days in space where they served as members of the Expedition 52 and 53 crews onboard the International Space Station. Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
This sparkly image shows Euclid’s view on a globular cluster called NGC 6397. Globular clusters are collections of hundreds of thousands of stars held together by gravity.
Located about 7800 light-years from Earth, NGC 6397 is the second-closest globular cluster to us. Together with other globular clusters it orbits in the disc of the Milky Way, where the majority of stars are located.
Globular clusters are some of the oldest objects in the Universe. That’s why they contain a lot of clues about the history and evolution of their host galaxies, like this one for the Milky Way.
The challenge is that it is typically difficult to observe an entire globular cluster in just one sitting. Their centres contain lots of stars, so many that the brightest ‘drown out’ the fainter ones. Their outer regions extend a long way out and contain mostly low-mass, faint stars. It is the faint stars that can tell us about previous interactions with the Milky Way.
“Currently no other telescope than Euclid can observe the entire globular cluster and at the same time distinguish its faint stellar members in the outer regions from other cosmic sources,” explains Euclid Consortium scientist Davide Massari of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy.
For example, Hubble has observed the core of NGC 6397 in detail, but it would take a lot of observing time with Hubble to map the outskirts of the cluster, something Euclid can do in just one hour. ESA’s Gaia mission can track the movement of globular clusters, but can’t tell what’s going on with very faint stars. And telescopes from the ground can cover a larger field, but with a poorer depth and resolution, so they can’t distinguish the faint outskirts entirely.
Davide and his colleagues will use Euclid to search for ‘tidal tails’ in globular clusters: a tidal tail is a trail of stars that extends far beyond the cluster because of a previous interaction with a galaxy.
“We expect all of the globular clusters in the Milky Way to have them, but so far we have only seen them around just a few,” says Davide. “If there are no tidal tails, then there could be a dark matter halo around the globular cluster, preventing the outer stars from escaping. But we don’t expect dark matter haloes around smaller-scale objects like globular clusters, only around bigger structures like dwarf galaxies or the Milky Way itself.”
If Davide and his team find tidal tails for NGC 6397 and other globular clusters in the Milky Way, that would allow them to very precisely calculate how the clusters orbit our galaxy. “And this will tell us how dark matter is distributed in the Milky Way,” Davide adds.
With Euclid’s observations, the team also wants to determine the age of globular clusters, to investigate the chemical properties of their stellar populations, and to study ultra-cool dwarf stars – the lowest mass members of the cluster.
The data in this image were taken in about one hour of observation. This colour image was obtained by combining VIS data and NISP photometry in Y and H bands; its size is 8800 x 8800 pixels. VIS and NISP enable observing astronomical sources in four different wavelength ranges. Aesthetics choices led to the selection of three out of these four bands to be cast onto the traditional Red-Green-Blue colour channels used to represent images on our digital screens (RGB). The blue, green, red channels capture the Universe seen by Euclid around the wavelength 0.7, 1.1, and 1.7 micron respectively. This gives Euclid a distinctive colour palette: hot stars have a white-blue hue, excited hydrogen gas appears in the blue channel, and regions rich in dust and molecular gas have a clear red hue. Distant redshifted background galaxies appear very red. In the image, the stars have six prominent spikes due to how light interacts with the optical system of the telescope in the process of diffraction. Another signature of Euclid special optics is the presence of a few, very faint and small round regions of a fuzzy blue colour. These are normal artefacts of complex optical systems, so-called ‘optical ghost’; easily identifiable during data analysis, they do not cause any problem for the science goals.
The cutout from the full view of NGC 6397 is at the high resolution of the VIS instrument. This is nine times better than the definition of NISP that was selected for the full view; this was done for the practical reason of limiting the format of the full image to a manageable size for downloading. The cutout fully showcases the power of Euclid in obtaining extremely sharp images over a large region of the sky in one single pointing. Although this image represents only a small part of the entire colour view, the same quality as shown here is available over the full field. The full view of NGC 6397 at the highest definition can be explored on ESASky.
[Image description]
This square astronomical image is speckled with hundreds of thousands of stars visible across the black expanse of space. The stars vary in size and colour, from blue to white to yellow/red. Blue stars are younger and red stars are older. More stars are located at the centre of the image, where they are bound together by gravity into a spheroid conglomeration – also called a globular cluster. Some of the stars are a bit larger than the rest, with six diffraction spikes.
Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
The High Resolution Stereo Camera on board ESA’s Mars Express snapped a view of a curious cloud formation that appears regularly in the vicinity of the Arsia Mons volcano.
This water ice cloud, which arises as the volcano slope interacts with the air flow, can be seen as the long white feature extending to the lower right of the volcano. The cloud, which measures 915 km in this view, also casts a shadow on the surface. This image was taken on 21 September 2018 from an altitude of about 6930 km. North is up.
More information: Mars Express keeps an eye on curious cloud via www.esa.int/vmccloud
At the invitation of ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson attended the ESA Council at ESA’s establishment ESTEC in the Netherlands on 15 June 2022.
ESA is currently working with NASA on many areas, from science such as the James Webb Space Telescope to exploration such as Mars Sample Return, Artemis and the International Space Station, to Earth observation.
At the ESA Council, a framework agreement between ESA and NASA for a strategic partnership in Earth System Science was signed, as well as a memorandum of understanding between ESA and NASA on the Lunar Pathfinder mission.
Credits: ESA-S.Corvaja
ESA signed a contract with Leonardo to design, manufacture, integrate and test the Sample Transfer Arm for the Mars Sample Return programme at the the Farnborough International Airshow in July 2022.
Attending the contract signature event were (from left to right): Giorgio Saccoccia, ASI’s president; David Parker, ESA's Director of Human and Robotic Exploration; Gabriele Pieralli, managing director of Leonardo’s Electronics Division; Luigi Pasquali.
Leonardo is leading a European industrial consortium with companies from Spain, France, Romania, Denmark, Greece, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
Credit: ESA-P.Sebirot