Saturn. American Tract Society Almanac. 1860.

NASA's Juno spacecraft captured this look of high altitude haze forming above cyclones. At the time the image was taken, Juno was about 5,095 miles above Jupiter’s cloud tops 🛰

Saturn has a mysterious hexagon at its north pole that has refused to give up its secrets, probably because neither Voyager 1 nor Cassini was able to plunge that deep and survive. Harvard scientists Rakesh Yadav and Jeremy Bloxham might have finally started to figure out what causes this peculiar feature. They believe that vortexes occur at the planet’s north pole because of atmospheric flows deep within the gas giant, and that these vortexes pinch an intense horizontal jet near the equator—which is what warps the storm into a hexagon. It still looks unnatural though.....!!!

Galactic center of Milky Way © cosmic_background

The Rosetta Nebula and NGC 2244

At the heart of the Rosetta nebula is an open cluster of stars, which is NGC 2244. The entire structure sits at the end of a giant molecular cloud, and you can easily spot the tell tale columns and protostars at the head showing active star formation on-going.

The bottom image is from Chandra, which gives the purple/pink colours for X-Ray sources, used particularly in spotting black hole accretion disks, pulsars and supernova remnants, we can see it's a lively place !

The entire structure is in the constellation of Monoceros at around 5,200 light years from Earth.

Saturn in near-infrared

Love, Pluto (ft. Charon) l NASA New Horizons

L1527 IRS - Protostar

Stars form when bodies of dust and gas create enough mass to create a gravitational effect that's able to then pull in more gas, the process continues and the mass increases until the pressure at the centre is sufficient for fusion to begin.

There's many examples of protostars, in fact back in 2012,  NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope focused in on L1527 IRS, believed at the time to be the youngest forming star ever found.

Recently, the JWST re-visited this protostar, and the title image was the result.

The forming star cannot be visually spotted, but is thought to be around 20-40% the mass of our own Sun already.

If you look closely, you can see there's a dark patch in the centre, this is actually the accretion disk around the newly formed star, what is left over after the formation, may go on to form the planets, in fact, they may be actually starting to be created already, as recent evidence does point to planets being born around the same time as the star does in many cases.

The protostar is only 450 light years from Earth in the Constellation of Taurus, and is thought to be around 100,000 years old, a blink of an eye in the life of a star, particularly of this mass.

Into the Cosmic Heart, IC 1850 © Aleix Roig

Apollo 16 rollout attracts a crowd at the Vehicle Assembly Building, 9 February 1972.

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.