The First Star

A beautiful green aurora slathers up the sky in this 2017 June snapshot from the International Space Station. Aurorae have the signature colors of excited molecules and atoms at the low densities that are found at extreme altitudes. Emission from atomic oxygen dominates this view. The glow is green at lower altitudes, but rarer reddish bands extend above the space station's horizon. The orbital scene was captured while passing over a point south and east of Australia, with stars above the horizon at the right belonging to the constellation Canis Major, Orion's big dog. Sirius, alpha star of Canis Major, is the brightest star near the Earth.

During the Artemis II mission, the Moon and Earth align in the same frame, each partially illuminated by the Sun.

Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window at 6:41 p.m. EDT, April 6, 2026, during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the Moon!!!!

A view of the near side of the Moon, the side we always see from Earth, as seen from the Orion spacecraft.

During the lunar fly on April 6, the Sun, the Moon, and the Orion spacecraft aligned, creating a solar eclipse from the perspective of the Artemis Il astronauts.

From the crew's perspective, the Moon appears large enough to completely block the Sun, creating nearly 54 minutes of totality and extending the view far beyond what is possible from Earth. The corona forms a glowing halo around the dark lunar disk, revealing details of the Sun's outer atmosphere typically hidden by its brightness. Also visible are stars, typically too faint to see when imaging the Moon, but with the Moon in darkness stars are readily imaged. This unique vantage point provides both a striking visual and a valuable opportunity for astronauts to document and describe the corona during humanity's return to deep space. The faint glow of the nearside of the Moon is visible in this image, having been illuminated by light reflected off the Earth.

NASA’s Space Launch System rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft with NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman (commander), Victor Glover (pilot), Christina Koch (mission specialist), and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen (mission specialist) onboard launches on the Artemis II mission, Wednesday, April 1, 2026, from Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Is this a cosmic monster ready to devour an unsuspecting galaxy?!

The red "monster” shown in the featured image is Cometary Globule CG 4. It is 1,300 light-years away in the Constellation Puppis. CG 4 is a molecular cloud, where hydrogen becomes cold enough to form molecules that can be brought together by gravity to create stars. The shape of CG 4 resembles that of a comet, but its head is 1.5 light-year in diameter and its tail is 8 light-years long- for comparison, the distance from the Earth to the sun is only 8 light-minutes. Astronomers believe that the tail of a cometary globule could have been shaped by a nearby supernova explosion or by irradiation from hot, massive stars. The edge-on spiral galaxy, ESO 257-19, is more than a hundred million light-years beyond CG 4, and is completely safe from the "monster”.

Pictured here are not auroras but light pillars! In most places on Earth, if you’re lucky you’ll be able to see a Sun pillar. It’s a column of light appearing to extend up from the Sun caused by flat fluttering ice-crystals reflecting sunlight from the upper atmosphere. Usually, these ice crystals evaporate before reaching the ground. During freezing temperatures, however, flat fluttering ice crystals may form near the ground and are sometimes known as a crystal fog. These small ice crystals may then reflect not the Sun but ground lights. The featured image captured not only numerous light pillars but also the iconic constellation of Orion, and was taken in Mohe, the northernmost city in China.

Massive stars in our Milky Way Galaxy live spectacular lives. Collapsing from vast cosmic clouds, their nuclear centres ignite and create heavy elements in their cores. After only a few million years (for the most massive stars), the material is blasted back into interstellar space where star formation can begin again.

This expanding debris cloud known as Cassiopeia A is an example of this final phase of the stellar life cycle. Light from the supernova explosion that created this remnant would have been first seen in planet Earth's sky about 350 years ago, although it took that light 11,000 years to reach us. This sharp image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the still-hot filaments and knots in the supernova remnant. The whitish, smoke-like outer shell of the expanding blast wave is about 20 light-years across. A series of light echoes from the massive star's cataclysmic explosion are also identified in Webb's detailed images of the surrounding interstellar medium.

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY to all my space & science lovers 🩷❤️🧡💛💚🩵💙💜🤎🤍🩶🖤

Space valentines to send to that someone special, or to send to yourself-because you deserve valentines too 💓

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this image of a solar flare, seen as the bright flash toward the upper middle on Feb. 4, 2026. The image shows extreme ultraviolet light that highlights the extremely hot material in flares and which is colorized in blue and red.

The very faint planetary nebula, known as Abell 7, is about 1,800 light-years from Earth. It is located just south of Orion toward the constellation Lepus, The Hare. Posing against the Milky Way stars, its simple spherical shape about 8 light-years in diameter is revealed in this deep telescopic image. The beautiful and complex shapes seen within the cosmic cloud are enhanced by emission from hydrogen and oxygen atoms, otherwise it would be much too faint to be appreciated by the eye. A planetary nebula represents a very brief final phase in stellar evolution that our Sun will experience 5 billion years hence, as the nebula's central, once sun-like star loses its outer layers. Abell 7 is estimated to be 20,000 years old, but its central star, seen here as a fading white dwarf, is about 10 billion years old.

A full moon shining over NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) and Orion spacecraft, atop the mobile launcher in the early hours of February 1, 2026.

This beautiful Hubble Space Telescope image is the supernova remnant: the Veil Nebula. It is the remnant of a star that is roughly 20 times as massive as the Sun and it exploded about 10,000 years ago. The Veil Nebula is situated about 2,400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.

Hubble images of this nebula were first taken in 1994 and 1997, and again in 2015. This view combines images taken in three different filters, highlighting emission from hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen atoms. The image shows just a small fraction of the Veil Nebula; if you could see the entire nebula without the aid of a telescope, it would be as wide as six full Moons placed side-by-side.

Although this image captures the Veil Nebula at a single point in time, it helps researchers understand how the supernova remnant evolves over decades. Combining this snapshot with previous Hubble observations, reveals the motion of individual knots and filaments of gas over that span of time, enhancing our understanding of this stunning nebula.

The James Webb Space Telescope is helping us look further and further into the universe than we ever did before.

Pictured above, is now confirmed to be the most distant galaxy ever known. MoM-z14, standing for Mirage or Miracle, is emitting light that comes from 280 million years after the Big Bang.

It was discovered that MoM-z14 has more nitrogen than thought to be possible by that time in the universe, suggesting that conditions might have been different from what has been theorized.

Due to the expansion of the universe, it is difficult to find these old galaxies. Their light is being stretched into longer wavelengths, making them appear redder. Following their discoveries, the MoM objects must be followed up with a spectrograph to confirm how much the light has been shifted. This process provides value as to how far away they really are.

The above image features a new type of astronomical object which astronomers have nicknamed Cloud-9 and is actually a starless, gas-rich, dark matter cloud- a remnant of early galaxy formation. This phenomenon has been named a Reionization-Limited H I Cloud or “RELHIC” (H I standing for neutral hydrogen).

Most of the universe’s mass is thought to be dark matter, but it is difficult to detect it because of its lack of light emission. Cloud-9 gives astronomers a rare look at a cloud dominated by dark matter. The diffuse magenta is radio data collected from the ground-based Very Large Array (VLA). The circle is the peak of the radio emission and where the search for stars was focused. The objects that appear within its boundaries are background galaxies.

Before Hubble, ground based telescopes only allowed scientists to think that this was a faint dwarf galaxy whose stars could not be seen. However, thanks to Hubble, it can be seen for what it really is.

It is thought that RELHICs are dark matter clouds that couldn’t accumulate enough gas from stars. The cloud may eventually form a galaxy in the future if it grows more massive, however how that would occur is under speculation.

It is located on the outskirts of a nearby spiral galaxy (M94) and is about 14 million lights years from Earth.