Friday, April 1, 2011: Astronaut Paolo Nespoli took this image of the Sinai Peninsula from the International Space Station on March 19, 2011.
--Tom Chao
Monday, April 4, 2011: The distinctive sky feature LBN 114.55+00.22, seen here, emits light, and therefore astronomers class it as an emission nebula. LBN stands for "Lynds Bright Nebula," named after the astronomer who published a catalogue of nebulae in 1965. 114.55+00.22 indicates the nebula’s coordinates in the Milky Way Galaxy.
--Tom Chao
Tuesday, April 5, 2011: The Soyuz TMA-21 vaults skyward from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday, April 5, 2001, carrying two Russian and one American spaceflyers to the International Space Station. The Soyuz, named "Gagarin," takes flight one week before the 50th anniversary of the flight of Yuri Gagarin, the first human to fly in space – which took off from the very same launch pad.
— Tom Chao
Wednesday, April 6, 2011: In Chile's Atacama Desert, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds — satellite galaxies of our own — glow brightly at the left. The Milky Way, our galaxy, appears brightly on the horizon, while the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope stands at the right.
--Tom Chao
Thursday, April 7, 2011: The Canadarm2 robotic arm attached to the International Space Station prepares to release the Japanese cargo ship Kounotori2 ("White Crane") on March 28, 2011. It fell into the Earth's atmosphere, and burned up. The ISS's robot, Dextre, is visible at upper right.
—Tom Chao
Friday, April 8, 2011: The Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view-Sensor (SeaWiFS) measured how much chlorophyll — the pigment that helps turn sunlight into organic energy for plants — existed in the seas and on land from 1998 to 2010. The more saturated blues and greens show a higher concentration of chlorophyll. Unusually, private companies operated the satellite which carried SeaWiFS, and NASA purchased the data from them.
—Tom Chao
Monday, April 11, 2011: Space shuttle orbiter Columbia landed at Edwards Air Force Base in southern California at the end of the first space shuttle mission, STS-1, on April 14, 1981. Astronauts John W. Young and Robert L. Crippen flew aboard Columbia.
—Tom Chao
Tuesday, April 12, 2011: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin waves to the crowd as he prepares to board the Vostok 1 spacecraft at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, on April 12, 1961, to make history's first human spaceflight, 50 years ago today.
—Tom Chao
Wednesday, April 13, 2011: The northern lights illuminate the sky in this image captured by photographer Nate Bolt during a flight from San Francisco to Paris. Bolt set up his camera in an empty seat facing a window and snapped more than 2,400 shots during the 11-hour flight. A time-lapse video of the flight can be seen at beepshow.com.
—Tom Chao
Thursday, April 14, 2011: The young open star cluster IC 1590 in the star formation region NGC 281 bears the nickname "Pacman Nebula," due to its resemblance to the well-known arcade game character. However, this close-up image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope zooms in on the center, and does not show the iconic outline of Pac-Man. Unlike in the arcade game, this nebula's gas and dust are forming new stars, not gobbling them up.
—Tom Chao
Friday, April 15, 2011: WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, took this picture of one of the closest star forming regions, a part of the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex. It lies some 400 light-years from Earth. Dust clouds and embedded newborn stars glow at infrared wavelengths in the false-color composition.
—Tom Chao
Monday, April 18, 2011: At NASA's Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, this shuttle-shaped cake appeared following NASA Administrator Charles Bolden's announcement regarding the retirement locations of the four orbiters. Created by Buddy Valastro of Carlo's Bakery ("Cake Boss"), the cake's engines amazingly fired, and the cake rose a few inches into the air. However, the cake was unable to clear the launch tower, and failed to achieve escape velocity.
—Tom Chao
Tuesday, April 19, 2011: NASA engineer Ernie Wright holds a dramatic pose in front of the first six flight-ready James Webb Space Telescope's primary mirror segments at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Engineers began final round-the-clock cryogenic testing on the mirrors before integrating them into the telescope's structure.
—Tom Chao
Wednesday, April 20, 2011: This Hubble Space Telescope image shows galaxy cluster LCDCS-0829. The huge mass of the galaxies in the cluster acts as a giant magnifying glass, in an effect called gravitational lensing.
—Tom Chao
Thursday, April 21, 2011: At the McDonald Observatory in West Texas, the nearby Guide Peak can be seen on fire, almost completely burned, on April 17, 2011, during a series of severe wildfires in the region. The observatory's Hobby-Eberly Telescope stands at right.
—Tom Chao
Friday, April 22, 2011: Charged particles spin along magnetic field lines extending from the sun's surface, visually observable in extreme ultraviolet light by the Solar Dynamics Laboratory spacecraft, Apr. 3-5, 2011.
—Tom Chao
Monday, April 25, 2011: Diego Urbina (@diegou) of the Mars500 project tweeted on April 1, 2011: "http://yfrog.com/h2d2m77j Finally fixed the anti-gravity generation device! Finalmente abbiamo sistemato il sistema anti-G! YES."
—Tom Chao
Tuesday, April 26, 2011: The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter created this image of the moon's south pole, showing shapes reminiscent of cosmic ice or clouds. Not a single photograph, the image combines 1,700 images collected over 6 lunar days (6 Earth months) into a multi-temporal illumination map. Analyzing the digitized images, each pixel in the map represents the percentage of time each spot on the moon's surface was illuminated by the sun. Since the moon's spin axis remains almost perpindicular to the ecliptic plane, some areas near the lunar poles can stay in permanent darkness or nearly continuous sunlight. The Shackleton Crater lies at near the center of the map.
—Tom Chao
Wednesday, April 27, 2011: The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), an instrument that will search for antimatter and dark matter in space, will fly aboard space shuttle Endeavour to the International Space Station, during a mission set to launch on Friday, April 29, 2011. Back on August 25, 2010, workers loaded the AMS (inside metal box at right) aboard a giant U.S. Air Force Galaxy jet for a flight from Geneva International Airport to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
SPACE.com is moving, too! We depart from our old office today, but the Image of the Day and our other features will continue without delay.
—Tom Chao
Friday, April 29, 2011: Lightning strikes near space shuttle Endeavour, waiting on launch pad 39a at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Thursday, April 28, 2011. NASA has scheduled Endeavour's STS-134 mission for launch on Friday, April 29 at 3:47 p.m. EDT.
—Tom Chao
Thursday, April 28, 2011: Interstellar molecular clouds shine with light from nearby luminous stars, creating reflection nebula NCG 1333. Carbon and silicon atoms in the cloud's molecules scatter blue light more efficiently than red light, producing the distinctive color.
—Tom Chao
