#deep space

A bright meteor burned up in the atmosphere while capturing Andromeda Galaxy

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At 252,756 miles from Earth — the farthest any humans have ever traveled — the Artemis II crew shared a heartfelt group hug.

It happened right after they honored Commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife by proposing to name a bright lunar crater “Carroll.”

In a tender, floating embrace inside the Orion spacecraft, the four astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — let the emotion of the moment wash over them: a mix of awe, loss, love, and unbreakable camaraderie.

Now, with the Moon behind them, the crew is accelerating homeward, hurtling back toward our planet on a trajectory that will culminate in a scheduled splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego on April 10.

Their mission stands as a powerful reminder that even at the farthest edge of deep space, where the Earth appears as a fragile blue marble against the infinite void, human connection remains our greatest strength.

When galaxies collide, the result can be unexpectedly calm. NGC 3256, seen by the James Webb Space Telescope, is the aftermath of a collision that occurred around 500 million years ago.

As the space between stars within galaxies is vast, much of the collision actually takes place between clouds of dust and gas. Those collisions compress those clouds and create the perfect conditions for new stars to form. Many of the stars pass each other and scatter about after the collision, appearing here as a smoky haze around the galaxy, which is in the midst of transformation.