Imagine the violence of this. A solar prominence erupting in 2011. This time-lapse video covers 90 minutes (one new frame every 24 seconds.) It was captured in ultra-violet light by NASA’s Solar Dynamic Observatory. From You Tube via Astronomy Picture of the Day for 18/8/24.

From YouTube via Astronomy Picture of the Day for 17/7/24.

Thsi is quite an arresting time-lapse video. Villarico volcano in Chile against a backdrop of the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds:-

A video from YouTube via Astronomy Picture of the Day for 2/6/24.

From Earth, the Moon, because it is tidally locked, seems stationary. This representation is assembled from photos taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and shows a full rotation of the Moon condensed into 24 seconds.

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is one of the most distinctive atmospheric features in the Solar System.

This video is from YouTube via Astronomy Picture of the Day for 19/5/24.

An animation based on data from the JunoCam imager on NASA’s Juno spacecraft with a computer-generated animation.

From You Tube via Astronomy Picture of the Day for 8/5/24.

Not real of course, just an animation, but it shows the weird effects of the black hole’s gravity on the light emanating from the disc.

From YouTube via Astronomy Picture of the Day for 14/4/24 comes this video of the end of this month’s solar eclipse, First the so-called diamond ring then the blobs of light known as Bailey’s Beads. All over in less than ten seconds.

By which I mean one moon eclipses another.

Neither is Earth’s Moon of course.

Via Astronomy Picture of  the Day for 26/2/24 this is Mars’s moon Phobos eclipsing its other moon, Deimos, as seen by European Space Agency‘s probe Mars Express.

Isn’t this beautiful?

The picture is from Astronomy Picture of the Day for 18/2/24, via the Hubble Telescope. It’s a ring galaxy, called Hoag’s Object after the man who discovered it.

Amazingly there is another ring galaxy in the background behind the circle of stars, at about seven o’clock in the main picture.

From Astronomy Picture of the Day for 28/1/24. Constructed from images sent back by the New Horizons probe, Pluto as it would apear to the naked eye:-

From Astronomy Picture of the Day for 29/12/23. This is an image of Uranus and some of its moons taken by the NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) on the James Webb Space Telescope. Uranus’s rings are also clearly visible. These moons are all named after characters in Shakespeare plays.

It never fails to astound me we can view such sharp images of faraway objects.