Space can be a wondrous place, and we've got the pictures to prove it! Take a look at our favorite pictures from space here, and if you're wondering what happened today in space history don't miss our On This Day in Space video show (opens in new tab) here! Friday, February 3, 2023: Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) glows above Stonehenge in southern England during its closest approach to Earth in 50,000 years. The comet , last seen from Earth long before the iconic 5,000-year-old stone circle was erected, has thrilled astrophotographers all over the world. This particular image was taken by Josh Dury, an astrophotographer from Bath, southwest England.
Dury, who's been taking images of the night sky since the age of seven, told Space. com that taking the stunning portrait of C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was "one of the most challenging" astrophotography projects he had ever undertaken. "With thick freezing fog rolling in over Salisbury plain [where the stone circle is located], my camera equipment was freezing up and there were only short interludes of clear skies," Dury wrote in an email to Space.
com. "Luckily the comet was visible for a period of time where I was able to capture this image, really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. " The comet will now start slowly retreating in the direction of Mars and dim gradually.
It will remain visible to amateur astronomers with backyard telescopes throughout the first half of February. It will then head deeper into the outer solar system and toward the Oort Cloud , where it came from. Astronomers are not certain whether C/2022 E3 (ZTF) ever visits Earth again.
But even if it does, we won't be around to see it. – Tereza Pultarova Thursday, February 2, 2023: British start-up Gravitilab has performed a first microgravity experiment with its customized quadcopter and specially designed microgravity capsule. The remotely controlled drone carried the capsule into an altitude of 2,000 feet (600 meters).
After its release, the capsule hurtled toward Earth in a freefall, creating a few seconds of simulated weightlessness inside. The company says its drone system, called LOUIS, can provide up to 20-second-long microgravity flights, up to ten times longer than what drop towers can offer. Companies from many industries including pharmaceuticals, materials and aerospace are interested in conducting research and experiments in microgravity conditions.
However, access to the International Space Station is expensive and limited, and so are Earth-based opportunities such as parabolic flights . Gravitilab's system is the first microgravity research facility using unmanned aerial technology. – Tereza Pultarova Wednesday, February 1, 2023: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared a photo of the Starship engine bay at the company's test site in southern Texas taken ahead of a planned static firing test of the engine's first stage.
"Just leaving the engine bay of Starship," Musk said in a Tweet (opens in new tab) . The tech mogul previously hinted that Starship may attempt its debut orbital flight later this month. Prior to that, SpaceX has to complete a static firing test involving all 33 Raptor engines of the rocket's Booster 7 first stage.
Once operational, the 395-foot-tall (120 meters) Starship will be the largest rocket in the world, taller than even NASA's Space Launch System moon rocket, which sent the Artemis 1 mission around the moon last year. – Tereza Pultarova Tuesday, January 31, 2023: Three enormous galaxy clusters are caught in the middle of a collision in this image consisting of observations made by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton. A new galaxy cluster is emerging from this collision some 780 million light-years from Earth, known as Abell 2256.
In addition to X-ray observations from Chandra and XMM-Newton , the image also contains data from three Earth-based radio telescopes and one optical telescope. Each of the telescopes provides a unique view into the processes that are underway in this giant structure that contains hundreds or thousands of individual galaxies. The X-ray component measured by Chandra and XMM reveals the location of the superhot gas filling this cluster.
In this image, the gas, with temperatures of several million degrees Fahrenheit, is shown as the central bright bluish cloud. The three radio telescopes involved, the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India, the Low Frequency Array in the Netherlands, and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico, spot material emitted from supermassive black holes at the centers of individual galaxies.
In this image, these radio emissions are shown as bright blots of light coming from the red-colored regions. The radio telescopes also see a vast mass of cosmic filaments depicted as the large red cloud. Infrared and optical observations by the Pan-STARRs telescope in Hawaii are shown as dots of white and pale yellow.
– Tereza Pultarova Monday, January 30, 2023: An Egyptian astrophotographer captured this awe inspiring image of the scary Shark nebula in the constellation of Cephus lurking above Egypt's Kottamia Observatory. "This has been the hardest object I've ever captured," Weal Omar, the author of the image and keen astrophotographer, told Space. com in an email.
"It's a real challenge for anyone who loves astrophotography. " The Shark nebula is a giant cloud of thin interstellar dust and gas some 650 light-years away from Earth. Although the monstrous nebula has 15 light-years across and appears in the sky as large as 10 moons stuck next to each other, the Shark is notoriously difficult to photograph due to the wispy nature of the cloud.
This image is a composition of several shots taken on three separate nights in a remote area near the Kottamia Astronomical Observatory, the largest telescope in the Arab world, which is located some 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Egypt's capital Cairo. "It was such scary night," Omar wrote in the email. "I heard different night animal sounds during the session, I was so scared that I even thought it was alien sounds.
" – Tereza Pultarova Friday, January 27, 2023: This detailed image shows the gap opening between the Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica and the iceberg that split from it on Saturday (Jan. 21). The high-resolution image was taken by satellites of the U.
S. Earth-observation company Planet on Tuesday (Jan. 24).
The calving of the iceberg has nothing to do with climate change , according to experts, and was a result of natural processes that had been underway for over a decade. The iceberg split along a crack known as Chasm-1 that scientists had monitored since 2012. The new fragment, which is now slowly being carried away by the Antarctic Coastal Current, is about 600 square miles (1,550 square kilometers) in size, about as big as the London metropolitan area or little larger than Houston.
The Brunt Ice Shelf hosts the British Halley VI Research Station, which had to be moved in 2016 away from the crumbling ice block. – Tereza Pultarova Thursday, January 25, 2023: SpaceX has destacked its Starship megarocket after an important pre-launch test in order to perform further separate testing on the vehicle's two stages at its Starbase facility in South Texas. "Launch and catch tower destacked Ship 24 from Booster 7 on the orbital pad today ahead of the Booster’s static fire test," SpaceX said in a Tweet.
Ship 24 is the name of this particular Starship upper stage, while Booster 7 is the first stage of the 395-foot-tall (120 meters) vehicle. The company will now perform a static fire test on Booster 7, which will involve firing all the stage's 33 Raptor engines for the first time. To date, Booster 7 has static-fired a maximum of 14 of its 33 Raptors simultaneously .
Ship 24 lit up all six of its Raptors last September. SpaceX's CEO Elon Musk previously said the giant rocket, which dwarfs even NASA's Space Launch System moon rocket, may perform its debut orbital flight as early as next month. – Tereza Pultarova Wednesday, January 25, 2023: A newly discovered asteroid that will pass very close to Earth on Friday has been photographed by an Italian astronomer as it makes its approach.
The space rock, called 2023 BU , is only about 13 to 30 feet (4 to 9 meters) wide, and was discovered last Saturday (Jan. 21) by prolific Crimea-based astronomer and telescope builder Gennadiy Borisov (the same man who discovered the first interstellar comet, which now bears his name, Borisov , in 2018) The asteroid will pass only 2,240 miles (3,600 kilometers) from Earth's surface on Friday (Jan. 27), becoming the 4th closest asteroid ever observed apart from those that actually struck the planet, according to the Virtual Telescope website (opens in new tab) .
For comparison, satellites of the global navigation system GPS orbit 12,500 miles (20,200 km) above Earth, about four times farther away. This image, however, was taken when the asteroid was still quite far, about 360,000 miles (580,000 km) away from us, which is 124,000 miles (200,000 km) farther away than the orbit of the moon . Italian astronomer Gianluca Masi took the image on Tuesday (Jan.
24) using his robotic Elena telescope located just outside of Rome. – Tereza Pultarova Tuesday, January 24, 2023: SpaceX's Starship megarocket is sitting on a launchpad at the company's Starbase facility in South Texas during a major test ahead of its debut flight. During the test, the 395-foot-tall (120 meters) Starship, which is taller than NASA's Space Launch System moon rocket, has gone through most of the procedures it will perform on launch day including loading liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellant into the vehicle's Super Heavy first stage and Starship upper stage.
SpaceX said on Twitter (opens in new tab) it will now "destack" the rocket's stages in order to perform a static fire test with the Super Heavy's 33 Raptor engines. – Tereza Pultarova Monday, January 20, 2023: The Gulf Stream whirls through the Atlantic Ocean in this image sequence based on data from European Earth-observation satellites as it transports warm water from the Caribbean toward western Europe. The animation shows the evolution of the Gulf Stream in December 2022 and January 2023.
The Gulf Stream plays an important role in European climate, warming it up considerably compared to what it would be like without it. Scientists worry that climate change could disrupt the Gulf Stream in the future, plunging northwestern Europe into a mini ice age. Existing data already suggest that the warming steam is slowing down and potentially nearing the point of collapse.
– Tereza Pultarova Friday, January 20, 2023: Satellites of U. S. Earth observation company Planet have documented the extent of the catastrophic floods and landslides that hit California following a series of devastating storms earlier this month.
In this image, taken on Jan. 1, fields around the city of Elk Grove, near Sacramento, are seen submerged in dirty brown water in the aftermath of record-breaking downpours. Similar images have come from other parts of the sunny state, which usually struggles with drought.
The storms and ensuing floods and landslides have killed at least 22 people across California. – Tereza Pultarova Thursday, January 19, 2023: An image taken by an Austrian comet hunter reveals a disconnection in Comet's C/2022 E3 (ZTF) tail that may have been caused by turbulent space weather. Seasoned astrophotographer Michael Jäger took this image on Tuesday (Jan.
17) after driving 500 miles (800 kilometers) from Austria to Bavaria in Germany to get a clear view of the sky. "The journey was not in vain," Jäger told Space. com in an email.
He added that when it comes to comets , an astrophotographer can waste no time as these icy balls change rapidly when they reach the warmer regions in the inner solar system . This particular image reveals what astronomers call a disconnection event, essentially a weakening in the comet's trademark tail, which makes it look as if the tail was breaking off. According to SpaceWeather.
com (opens in new tab) , this disruption in the tail is likely caused by turbulent space weather , namely the stronger than usual solar wind that has been released during a recent coronal mass ejection (CME). CMEs are bursts of highly energetic particles emitted from the sun's upper atmosphere, the corona, that travel across the solar system, interfering with the atmospheres of planets and other bodies. C/2022 E3 (ZTF) , which was discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at the Palomar Observatory in California in March 2022, is making its first close approach to Earth in about 50,000 years.
The comet will soon become visible to the naked eye, experts say, and will reach its closest distance to Earth on Feb. 1, zooming past our planet at about one quarter the sun-Earth distance. Jäger, who has photographed more than 1,100 comets since he took up astrophotography four decades ago, is certain to take more awe-inspiring images, which you can find on his Twitter account .
– Tereza Pultarova Wednesday, January 18, 2023: A British astrophotographer has taken this image of a larger than Earth sunspot that has been battering our planet with solar flares in the past few days. The sunspot , named AR 13190, is so large that it can be seen without a telescope, with the naked eye just with the help of sun-observing eclipse glasses (don't look at the sun's disk with unprotected eyes). The image, taken by retired molecular biologist and life-long astronomy enthusiast Kevin Earp and shared on his Twitter (opens in new tab) account on Tuesday (Jan 17), shows the star at the center of our solar system in a specific part of the light spectrum that is emitted by energetic hydrogen atoms in the sun's chromosphere, the lower layer of the sun's atmosphere .
"This image was taken with a 100mm refractor and Daystar Quark [filter] to capture the light of hydrogen-alpha, which is not visible to the unaided eye," Earp told Space. com in an email. In his tweet he added that taking the image was rather difficult due to the low position of the sun in the sky in this part of the year in the U.
K, where he is observing from. "Seeing in h-alpha was awful today with the #sun being so low, but I managed to catch the largest spot currently on the disk," he said, adding that "Earth could fit comfortably inside the dark umbra [the dark area of the spot], at a toasty 3,700 degrees Celsius [6,692 degrees Fahrenheit]". – Tereza Pultarova Tuesday, January 17, 2023: A satellite image by U.
S. Earth observation company Planet shows the Spanish Almería region covered with vegetable greenhouses. Nearly all of the ground in this 100 square-mile (260 square kilometers) area is now buried underneath plastic foil, which reflects incoming sun rays so efficiently that the region has actually cooled down in the recent decades in spite of the progress of climate change.
Could this be a solution to our planet's global warming problems? The traditionally agricultural Almería has seen its
