Festival of Lights

WISE, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, has a new view of Barnard 3, or IRAS Ring G159.6-18.5, that is awash in bright green and red dust clouds. Interstellar clouds like these are stellar nurseries, where baby stars are being born.

The green ring is made of tiny particles of warm dust whose composition is very similar to smog found here on Earth. The red cloud in the center is most likely made of dust that is more metallic and cooler than the surrounding regions. HD 278942, the bright star in the middle of the red cloud, is so luminous that it is the likely cause of the surrounding ring's glow. The bright greenish-yellow region left of center is similar to the ring, though more dense. The bluish-white stars scattered throughout are stars located both in front of, and behind, the nebula.

Regions similar to this nebula are found near the band of the Milky Way galaxy in the night sky. This nebulas is slightly off this band, near the boundary between the constellations of Perseus and Taurus, but at a relatively close distance of only about 1,000 light-years, the cloud is a still part of our Milky Way.

The colors used in this image represent specific wavelengths of infrared light. Blue and cyan (blue-green) represent light emitted at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is predominantly from stars. Green and red represent light from 12 and 22 microns, respectively, which is mostly emitted by dust.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Expedition 30 Soyuz Rolls to the Pad

The Soyuz TMA-03M spacecraft is rolled out by train on its way to the launch pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Monday, Dec. 19, 2011. The launch of the Soyuz spacecraft with Expedition 30 Soyuz Commander Oleg Kononenko of Russia, NASA Flight Engineer Don Pettit and European Space Agency astronaut and Flight Engineer Andre Kuipers is scheduled for 8:16 a.m. EST on Wednesday, Dec. 21.    Image Credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi

Spiral Galaxy

Resembling festive lights on a holiday wreath, this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the nearby spiral galaxy M74 is an iconic reminder of the impending season. Bright knots of glowing gas light up the spiral arms, indicating a rich environment of star formation.

Messier 74, also called NGC 628, is a stunning example of a grand-design spiral galaxy that is viewed by Earth observers nearly face-on. Its perfectly symmetrical spiral arms emanate from the central nucleus and are dotted with clusters of young blue stars and glowing pink regions of ionized hydrogen (hydrogen atoms that have lost their electrons). These regions of star formation show an excess of light at ultraviolet wavelengths.

Tracing along the spiral arms are winding dust lanes that also begin very near the galaxy's nucleus and follow along the length of the spiral arms. M74 is located roughly 32 million light-years away in the direction of the constellation Pisces, the Fish. It is the dominant member of a small group of about half a dozen galaxies, the M74 galaxy group. In its entirety, it is estimated that M74 is home to about 100 billion stars, making it slightly smaller than our Milky Way.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

Apollo 17 Extravehicular Activity - 39 Years Ago

39 years ago, scientist-astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt is photographed standing next to a huge, split lunar boulder during the third Apollo 17 extravehicular activity (EVA) at the Taurus-Littrow landing site. The Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), which transported Schmitt and Eugene A. Cernan to this extravehicular station from their Lunar Module (LM), is seen in the background. The mosaic is made from two frames from Apollo 17 Hasselblad magazine 140. The two frames were photographed by Cernan.

Image Credit: NASA/Eugene Cernan

USS Intrepid Aircraft Carrier at Enterprise Title Transfer

USS Intrepid aircraft carrier which is home to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum is seen in the late afternoon on Sunday, Dec. 11, 2011 in New York City. Earlier in the afternoon NASA transferred title and ownership of the space shuttle Enterprise to the museum. The transfer is the first step toward Intrepid receiving Enterprise in the spring of 2012.

Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

NASA Deputy Administrator Tours Blue Origin

NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver, fourth from left meets Blue Origin Founder Jeff Bezos, third from left, next to Blue Origin's crew capsule along with other Blue Origin team members, Bretton Alexander, left, Jeff Ashby, second from left, Rob Meyerson, fifth from left, and Robert Millman at the company's headquarters in Kent, Wash., Thursday, Dec. 8, 2011.

Blue Origin is one of the awardees selected to receive a Space Act Agreement (SAA) during the second round of the Commercial Crew Development Program (CCDev2). These awards, which began in 2009, were made to stimulate efforts within U.S. industry to develop and demonstrate human spaceflight capabilities and advance commercial crew space transportation system concepts. Current efforts among the companies will mature the design and development of elements of the system, such as launch vehicles and spacecraft.

Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Kepler Launch in 2009

On Launch Pad 17-B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, United Launch Alliance's Delta II rocket carrying NASA's Kepler spacecraft rises through the exhaust cloud created by the firing of the rocket’s engines. Liftoff was on time at 10:49 p.m. EST on March 6, 2009.

Kepler is a space-borne telescope designed to search the nearby region of our galaxy for Earth-size planets orbiting in the habitable zone of stars like our sun. The habitable zone is the region around a star where temperatures permit water to be liquid on a planet's surface. The challenge for Kepler is to look at a large number of stars in order to statistically estimate the total number of Earth-size planets orbiting sun-like stars in the habitable zone. Kepler will survey more than 100,000 stars in our galaxy.

Astronaut Tests SAFER Backpack

Astronaut Mark Lee tests the new backpack called Simplified Aid for EVA Rescue (SAFER), a system designed for use in the event a crew member becomes untethered while conducting an EVA. The Lidar-In-Space Technology Experiment (LITE) is shown in the foreground. The LITE payload employs lidar, which stands for light detection and ranging, a type of optical radar using laser pulses instead of radio waves to study Earth's atmosphere. Unprecedented views were obtained of cloud structures, storm systems, dust clouds, pollutants, forest burning, and surface reflectance. The STS-64 mission marked the first untethered U.S. EVA in 10 years, and was launched on September 9, 1994, aboard the Space Shuttle Orbiter Discovery.

Image Credit: NASA

Apollo 17 Splashdown

The Apollo 17 spacecraft, containing astronauts Eugene A. Cernan, Ronald E. Evans, and Harrison H. Schmitt, glided to a safe splashdown at 2:25 p.m. EST on Dec. 19, 1972, 648 kilometers (350 nautical miles) southeast of American Samoa.

The astronauts were flown by recovery helicopter to the U.S.S. Ticonderoga slightly less than an hour after the completion of NASA's sixth and last manned lunar landing in the Apollo program.

Image Credit: NASA

First Supernova Companion Star Found

In 2004, an international team of astronomers had, for the first time, observed a stellar "survivor" emerge from a double star system involving an exploded supernova.

Supernovae are some of the most significant sources of chemical elements in the universe, and they are at the heart of our understanding of the evolution of galaxies. In this artist's view, the red super-giant supernova progenitor star (left) is exploding after having transferred about 10 solar masses of hydrogen gas to the blue companion star (right).

Image Credit: NASA