Sky Pictures

Here are some great sky pictures. You can turn any of these images into your computer desktop wallpaper. Just click on an image to enlarge it, and then right-click and choose “Set as Desktop Background”.

This is an image of asteroid 2010 AB78 obtained by NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. 2010 AB78, the red dot in the image, is 158 million kilometers away from the earth.

This image of the Leonids meteor shower was taken on November 17, 1999 from an aircraft during the 1999 Leonids Multi-Instrument Aircraft Campaign. The Leonids meteor shower radiates from the constellation Leo where it got its name also.

This image of white dwarf stars located at the Milky Way galaxy was taken using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. This white dwarf stars are approximately 12 to 13 billion years old.

Here’s an interesting image of the North star, also known as Polaris. The North Star, as seen on the image is actually a triple star system. This was captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.

This image shows the historical launching of the Saturn V rocket of the Apollo 11 mission which happened on July 16, 1969 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This mission successfully brought humans to the moon.

We have written many articles about the sky for Universe Today. Here’s an article about how to find Venus in the sky, and here’s an article about the weird giant spiral seen in sky over Norway.

If you’d like more info about the Earth, check out Visible Earth, and here’s a link to the NASA Earth Observatory Homepage.

We’ve also recorded related episodes of Astronomy Cast about Sky Surveys. Listen here, Episode 118: Sky Surveys.

Tagged as: Earth Observation, NASA, picture, pictures, sky