#PPOD: Olympus Mons, the largest known volcano in the Solar System, as captured by ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. The volcano is about 620 km across and 21 km tall. The textured landscape at the bottom is made up of giant landslide deposits.
Credit: ESA/Mars Express; Processing: Jacint Roger Perez
#PPOD: This cutout from the new JWST short-wavelength infrared image of the Orion Nebula shows bright 'fingers' of gas racing away from an explosion that occurred roughly 500 to 1000 years ago in the heart of a dense molecular cloud behind the nebula, perhaps as two young massive stars collided. The dense cloud is called Orion Molecular Cloud 1 and lies to the northwest of the visible Trapezium stars in Orion. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA; Science leads and image processing: M. McCaughrean, S. Pearson
#PPOD: What is creating these dark streaks on Mars? No one is sure. Candidates include dust avalanches, evaporating dry ice sleds, and liquid water flows. What is clear is that the streaks occur through light surface dust and expose a deeper dark layer. Similar streaks have been photographed on Mars for years and are one of the few surface features that change their appearance seasonally. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/HiRISE camera Team/University of Arizona
#PPOD: In Cerro Paranal, the mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert that is home to ESO’s VLT, the atmospheric conditions are so exceptional that fleeting events such as the green flash of the setting Sun are seen relatively frequently. Now, however, ESO Photo Ambassador Gerhard Hüdepohl has captured an even rarer sight: a green flash from the Moon, instead of the Sun. The photographs are probably the best ever taken of the phenomenon. Credit: G.Hüdepohl/ESO
The Juno mission's JunoCam has taken some lovely images in seven years at the gas giant, including this one of Jupiter's "eye" captured early on during Perijove 09. The key to these amazing pictures, however, is in the citizen scientists who process them. Learn more: https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing
#PPOD: The small icy moon Mimas, floating in space above the giant planet Saturn, crossed by shadows of its vast ring system. The image is PIA06176, taken by the Cassini spacecraft on 18 January 2005; at the time, the spacecraft was 1.4 million km from Saturn. The scene is in approximately true color. Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI/CICLOPS
#PPOD: This image of an unnamed mesa on Mars was taken by the Mars Orbiter Camera onboard the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft on 8 April 2001, from a distance of 450 km. If this picture vaguely reminds you of something, that's because this was the mesa that originally sent the so-called "face on Mars" to the archives of pareidolia. Erosion does this all the time on Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
#PPOD: This picture shows the stellar system HIP 81208, captured by ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Astronomers thought HIP 81208 was a system consisting of a massive central star (A, the central bright spot), a brown dwarf (B) circling around it, and a low-mass star (C) orbiting further away. However, a new study has revealed a never-before-seen hidden gem: an object (Cb), approximately 15x Jupiter's mass, orbiting around the smaller of the two stars (C). Credit Image: ESO/A. Chomez et al
#PPOD: NASA’s JWST’s high resolution, near-infrared look at Herbig-Haro 211 reveals exquisite detail of the outflow of a young star, an infantile analog of our Sun. Herbig-Haro objects are formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from newborn stars form shock waves colliding with nearby gas and dust at high speeds. The image showcases a series of bow shocks to the lower left and upper right. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, T. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies)
#PPOD: NGC 4632 hides a secret from optical telescopes. It is surrounded by a ring of cool hydrogen gas orbiting at 90 degrees to its spiral disk. NGC 4632 is among the first in which a radio telescope survey revealed a polar ring. The featured composite image combines this gas ring, observed with the highly sensitive ASKAP telescope, with optical data from the Subaru telescope. Credit: Jayanne English (U. Manitoba), Nathan Deg (Queen's University) & WALLABY Survey, CSIRO/ASKAP, NAOJ
#PPOD: This is one of the most famous supernovas, SN 1987A. JWST's sensitivity and resolution have given us the most clear and detailed look yet, revealing a new feature: small crescent-like structures thought to be a part of the outer layers of gas shot out from the supernova explosion.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Mikako Matsuura (Cardiff University), Richard Arendt (NASA-GSFC, UMBC), Claes Fransson (Stockholm University), Josefin Larsson (KTH); Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI)
#PPOD: It might look like the opening scene from The Lion King, but this stunning picture was actually taken in the Chilean Atacama Desert rather than the African savannas. Taking centre stage is ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), or part of it, at least.
The ELT’s steel dome is about 80 metres tall and one day it will play host to the world’s biggest eye on the sky.
#PPOD: NASA’s LRO – the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter – spacecraft imaged the Chandrayaan-3 landing site on the #Moon’s surface. The ISRO's Chandrayaan-3 touched down on the Moon on Aug. 23, 2023. The Chandrayaan-3 landing site is located about 600 kilometers from the Moon’s South Pole. The bright halo around the vehicle resulted from the rocket plume interacting with the fine-grained regolith (soil). Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University
#PPOD: This photo is an approximate true color image of comet 67P taken by the Rosetta spacecraft's OSIRIS Narrow Angle Camera on March 17, 2015. This image is a four-frame mosaic, with each color frame imaged through VIS_BLUE, VIS_GREEN, and VIS_RED filters. At the time this image was taken, Rosetta was located roughly 82 km from the comet's center. Credit: ESA / Rosetta / MPS for OSIRIS Team (MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA) / Justin Cowart
This false-color image was created from raw data taken using the #JunoCam onboard NASA's Juno spacecraft orbiting #Jupiter and features a northern circumpolar cyclone in artistically enhanced detail. Taken during perijove - closest approach to Jupiter - number 46.
#PPOD: Three of Saturn's moons -- Tethys, Enceladus, and Mimas -- are captured in this group photo from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
Tethys (1,062 kilometers across) appears above the rings, while Enceladus (504 kilometers across) sits just below the center. Mimas (396 kilometers across) hangs below and off to the left of Enceladus.
The image is a color-composite from calibrated raw Cassini image data.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Cassini Imaging Team/Jason Major
This image, captured by the Landing Imager Camera onboard the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) Chandrayaan-3 lander, shows the lunar surface after the craft successfully touched down on the Moon. The photo also shows one leg of the lander and its accompanying shadow.
This is NGC 4569, aka Messier 90, an intermediate spiral galaxy located 60 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. The image is a color-composite from images captured with Hubble's WFC3 instrument on Dec. 12, 2019.
This surface image was taken with Cassini's narrow-angle camera during a very close flyby of Enceladus on Aug. 11, 2008. Cairo Sulcus is shown crossing the upper left portion of the image. An unnamed fracture curves around the lower right corner. This view shows an area about 20 kilometers across.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI and Cassini Imaging Team
This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows boulders that were ejected from the asteroid Dimorphos after the DART spacecraft slammed into it in September 2022. The bright object with a tail is Dimorphos, and the tiny white dots clustered around it are boulders ranging in size from 1 to 6.7 meters in diameter.
This view of a crescent Earth as seen beyond the limb of the Moon was captured from inside the Apollo 16 CSM "Casper" in lunar orbit on April 24, 1972. This version is cropped and processed from NASA image # AS16-122-19564.