Earth Day, marked annually on April 22, exists primarily to inspire the global population to work together to protect our planet from environmental harm. But it’s also a chance to celebrate everything that’s special about this unique and wonderful “blue marble.” With that in mind, take a moment to lose yourself in this collection of awe-inspiring Earth images, all of them shot from space.
Stunning James Webb image shows the beating heart of our Milky Way
A new image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the heart of our galaxy, in a region close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*. The image shows a star-forming region where filaments of dust and gas are clumping together to give birth to new baby stars.
The image was captured using Webb's NIRCam instrument, a camera that looks in the near-infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with shorter wavelengths shown in blue and cyan and longer wavelengths shown in yellow and red.
Here’s the first image of OSIRIS-REx as it approaches Earth with asteroid sample
This weekend will see the landing of NASA's first asteroid sample return mission, OSIRIS-REx. The spacecraft visited asteroid Bennu to study, photograph, and scoop up a sample from it, and now OSIRIS-REx is on it's way back to Earth and is almost here.
On Sunday, September 24, the spacecraft will release the capsule containing the sample, which will land in the Utah desert, where researchers will collect it for study. The spacecraft itself will continue on to study another asteroid, Apophis, and be rechristened OSIRIS-Apex.
Neptune has a dark spot of its own, and it has been imaged from Earth
While the most famous planetary spot in the solar system would have to be Jupiter's Great Red Spot, an epic storm 10,000 miles wide that has been raging for hundreds of years, other planets are known to host spots of their own as well. That includes Neptune, which had a large dark spot that was first imaged by Voyager 2 when it passed by in the 1980s.
Neptune's spot was named the Great Dark Spot, but when the Hubble Space Telescope tried to image the spot in 1994, it had disappeared. Now, a Neptune spot has been imaged from the ground for the first time, using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT).