Wednesday, June 1, 2011: Space shuttle Endeavour made its final landing at Kennedy Space Center, Wednesday, June 1, 2011, in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Endeavour spent 16 days in space on the STS-134 mission outfitting the International Space Station. During 25 flights, Endeavour spent 299 days in space, and traveled more than 122.8 million miles. It first launched on May 7, 1992.
—Tom Chao
Thursday, June 2, 2011: Spiral galaxy NGC 634 appears to have a perfect spiral structure, as shown by this Hubble Space Telescope photograph. However, recently a type Ia supernova known as SN2008a was spotted in the galaxy, and it briefly rivalled the brilliance of its entire host galaxy. However, it can no longer be seen in this image, which was taken around a year and a half later.
—Tom Chao
Friday, June 3, 2011: This new image of the spiral galaxy NGC 3244 was taken with the help of the President of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus, during his visit to ESO’s Paranal Observatory on April 6, 2011. The Czech Republic joined ESO in 2007. To the right of the galaxy, an unremarkable foreground star in our own Milky Way, TYC 7713-527-1, shines brightly. The galaxy resides at a distance of about 90 million light years, while the star lies thousands of times closer within our own galaxy.
—Tom Chao
Monday, June 6, 2011: Mercury displays a beautiful crescent shape in this image, acquired as the MESSENGER spacecraft floated high above Mercury's southern hemisphere. On the left side, the terminator divides day from night. On the right side is the sunlit limb, separating Mercury from the darkness of space.
—Tom Chao
Tuesday, June 7, 2011: NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows a huge complex of star-forming clouds and stellar clusters found in the constellation Cygnus. Viewers can easily see the constellation Cygnus ("The Swan") in the northern hemisphere’s summertime sky. The constellation also commonly goes by the name of the Northern Cross. WISE focuses on the region surrounding the swan’s heart, revealing vast clouds of dust that light up the sky in infrared. This image covers an area of the sky almost ten times as wide as the full moon and nine times as high.
—Tom Chao
Wednesday, June 8, 2011: Astronaut Andrew Feustel reenters the International Space Station after completing an 8-hour, 7-minute spacewalk on Sunday, May 22, 2011, the second of four STS-134 mission spacewalks.
—Tom Chao
Thursday, June 9, 2011: The International Space Station floats approximately 220 miles above the Earth with space shuttle Endeavour docked to it. Expedition 27 crew member Paolo Nespoli took the photograph from the Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft as he and two other astronauts departed the ISS on May 23, 2011 (US time). The pictures taken by Nespoli are the first taken of a shuttle docked to the International Space Station from a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
—Tom Chao
Friday, June 10, 2011: The two billowing structures of IRAS 13208-6020 formed from material shed by a central star. This phenomenon only lives briefly, and it gives astronomers an opportunity to watch the early stages of planetary nebula formation, hence the name protoplanetary, or preplanetary nebula. This object possesses a very clear bipolar form, with two very similar outflows of material in opposite directions and a dusty ring around the star. Protoplanetary nebulae do not shine, but reflect light from the central star back to us. As the star continues to evolve, it becomes hot enough to emit strong ultraviolet radiation that can ionise the surrounding gas, making it glow as a spectacular planetary nebula. Before the nebula begins to shine, winds of material ejected from the star shape the surrounding gas into intricate patterns that appear later once the nebula begins to glow.
—Tom Chao
Monday, June 14, 2011: Mars Express spacecraft obtained this image of buried ice deposits in the south polar region of Mars, close to Ulyxis Rupes, on January 15, 2011, during the Martian spring, using the High Resolution Stereo Camera. South is to the left, north is to the right.
—Tom Chao
Monday, June 13, 2011: This image covers about 230 degrees of the sky above ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) on Cerro Paranal in the Chilean Atacama Desert. The VLT’s four Unit Telescopes appear most prominently in the foreground. Each possesses a gigantic mirror 8.2 meters across. Among the many celestial objects pictured, the moon sits at left illuminating the scene, with Jupiter as a bright dot above it. The group of stars at the top, slightly left of center, is the Pleiades.
—Tom Chao
Wednesday, June 15, 2011: At NASA Kennedy Space Center's Visitor Complex, Star Trek memorabilia has gone on temporary display. "Star Trek: The Exhibition" presents a traveling exhibit of artifacts from the past 40 years of the iconic television and motion picture franchise. The exhibition features costumes, props and models, including a recreation of the U.S.S. Enterprise bridge from the original series, seen here.
—Tom Chao
Thursday, June 16, 2011: The moon turned a blood red over the Sossusvlei Desert Lodge on NamibRand Nature Reserve in Namibia in this stunning photo taken by skywatcher George Tucker on June 15, 2011.
—Tom Chao
Friday, June 17, 2011: Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo mothership carrying SpaceShipTwo flew alongside Virgin America’s Airbus A320, named "My Other Ride Is a Spaceship," to inaugurate San Francisco International Airport (SFO)'s new Terminal 2 on April 6, 2011. SpaceShipTwo is a rocket-powered space plane intended to eventually take passengers to sub-orbital space.
—Tom Chao
Monday, June 20, 2011: Large cacti appear to point at the sky in the Chilean Atacama Desert. The Milky Way dominates the image, with the Large Magellanic Cloud in the lower right. These cacti (Echinopsis atacamensis) grow on average 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) per year, and reach heights of up to 30 feet (9 meters). These particular plants are found on the winding road connecting ESO's Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Operation Support Facility to the Array Operation Site at ESO, at an altitude of about 11,500 feet (3500 meters).
—Tom Chao
Tuesday, June 21, 2011: The Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, stands inside the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The photograph was taken during mobility testing on June 3, 2011. Workers continue preparing to ship the rover to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in June for its fall 2011 launch.
—Tom Chao
Wednesday, June 22, 2011: Three of Saturn's moons appear in a somber group portrait along with the northern, sunlit ringplane. Rhea (949 miles or 1,528 kilometers across) is closest to Cassini spacecraft, which took the photograph, and appears largest at the center of the image. Enceladus (313 miles or 504 kilometers across) is to the right of Rhea. Dione (698 miles or 1,123 kilometers across) is to the left of Rhea, partly obscured by Saturn. Saturn is present on the left of this image but its night side is too dark to see.
—Tom Chao
Thursday, June 23, 2011: Spiral galaxy NGC 7479 displays tightly wound arms of the spiral galaxy spinning in an anticlockwise direction, in this Hubble Space Telescope photograph. However, at radio wavelengths, this galaxy (sometimes nicknamed the Propeller Galaxy) spins the other way, with a jet of radiation bending in the opposite direction of the stars and dust in the arms of the galaxy. Astronomers think that the radio jet in NGC 7479 began its bizarre backwards spin following a merger with another galaxy.
—Tom Chao
Friday, June 24, 2011: The STS-135 crew members speak to the media at NASA Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39A in Florida. Commander Chris Ferguson holds a microphone as Pilot Doug Hurley (red cap), along with Mission Specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim, look on. Space shuttle Atlantis' astronauts are at Kennedy for a launch countdown dress rehearsal called the Terminal Countdown Demonstration Test (TCDT) and other training. Atlantis and its crew are scheduled to lift off July 8, 2011, carrying the Raffaello multi-purpose logistics module to the International Space Station. STS-135 will be the 33rd flight of Atlantis, the 37th shuttle mission to the space station, and the 135th and final mission of NASA's Space Shuttle Program.
—Tom Chao
Monday, June 27, 2011: NASA’s Wide-field Survey Explorer (WISE) took this image of the Elephant’s Trunk nebula, showing clouds of dust and gas pushed and eroded by a massive star. The bright ‘trunk’ of the nebula near the center is an especially dense cloud holding up against the star’s powerful radiation and stellar wind. Other "elephant trunk" structures exist in other nebulae, but this is the only nebula that uses the term in its moniker. More distant examples of elephant trunks can be seen in LBN 211.91-01.37 and the Soul nebula.
—Tom Chao
Tuesday, June 28, 2011: Sandra Olson, an aerospace engineer at NASA's Glenn Research Center, demonstrates just how fire acts differently in space through her art. She overlaid three separate microgravity flame images in this artwork. Each image depicts flame spread over cellulose paper in a spacecraft ventilation flow in microgravity. The different colors represent different chemical reactions within the flame. The blue areas are caused by chemiluminescence (light produced by a chemical reaction.) The white, yellow and orange regions get their colors from glowing soot within the flame zone. This image won first place in the 2011 Combustion Art Competition, held at the 7th U.S. National Combustion Meeting.
—Tom Chao
Wednesday, June 29, 2011: The sun rises over the Atlantic Ocean at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, illuminating space shuttle Atlantis' external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters on Launch Pad 39A. Launch is scheduled to take place for the STS-135 mission on July 8, 2011. This image was taken on June 23, 2011.
—Tom Chao
Thurssday, June 30, 2011: Star cluster Melotte 15 emerges from the dense collapsed molecular cloud that created it a few million years ago, as residual gas is dispersed by combined stellar winds of fast-moving particles originating from the new born stars.
—Tom Chao
For older Image of the Day pictures, please visit the Image of the Day archives. Above: NGC 2467.
