Wednesday, February 1, 2012: Chief space weather forecasters Yihua Zheng and Antti Pulkkinen of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center are helping to implement a computer technique called ensemble forecasting that will improve NASA’s ability to predict the impact of severe solar storms.
— Tom Chao
Thursday, February 2, 2012: Two images displayed together show the fruits of NASA’s labors. In 2011, MESSENGER spacecraft went into orbit around Mercury (left), and Dawn spacecraft orbited main-belt asteroid Vesta (right), sending back the images seen here. Both spacecraft were the first to orbit their respective subjects. MESSENGER and Dawn are missions in NASA's lowest-cost Discovery program. Vesta has a much more irregular shape than Mercury, as a result of Mercury's far larger gravity, which squeezed the planet into a sphere. Mercury possesses a mass about 1300 times greater than that of Vesta.
— Tom Chao
Friday, February 3, 2012: Galaxy NGC 2217 swirls in the constellation of Canis Major (The Great Dog). A distinctive bar of stars within an oval ring anchors the galaxy centrally. Further from the center, tightly wound spiral arms almost form a circular ring around the galaxy. Astronomers classify NGC 2217 as a barred spiral galaxy, and it lies nearly face-on to us. The bluish outer spiral arms indicate the presence of hot, luminous, young stars, born from interstellar gas clouds. The central bulge and bar appear yellower, due to the presence of older stars. Dark lanes of cosmic dust block out some of the starlight in the galaxy's arms and central bulge. The majority of spiral galaxies in the local universe, including our own Milky Way, are thought to possess a bar of some kind.
— Tom Chao
Monday, February 6, 2012: NuSTAR, The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, will image the sky for the first time in the high energy X-ray (6-79 keV) region of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our view of the universe in this spectral window has been limited previously. NuSTAR is scheduled to launch March 14, 2012, from an aircraft operating out of Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Here, NuSTAR is seen undergoing a solar array illumination test. Image released via Twitter Feb. 3, 2012.
— Tom Chao
Tuesday, February 7, 2012: Astrophotographer Adam Block captured this image of nebula LBN 1022 in the constellation of Monoceros at the Mt. Lemmon Sky Center/University of Arizona in Nov. 2011.
— Tom Chao
Wednesday, February 8, 2012: The East Coast of the United States glows at night, as seen from the International Space Station. This looks generally northeastwards with the Philadelphia-New York City-Boston corridor at bottom center. The western shoreline of Lake Ontario with Toronto lies on the left edge. Montreal, Quebec, Canada, gleams as the bright spot near the center. Atmospheric limb and light activity from the Aurora Borealis appear intertwined due to an optical illusion. Photo taken Jan. 29, 2012.
— Tom Chao
Thursday, February 9, 2012: On Jan. 27, 2012, a large X-class flare erupted from an active region on the sun, near the solar west limb. X-class flares represent the most powerful of all solar events. The X-ray telescope on Hinode spacecraft captured this image of the flare, showing an emission from plasma heated to greater than eight million degrees during the energy-release process of the flare.
— Tom Chao
Friday, February 10, 2012: Cassini spacecraft took this visible-light image of a crescent Enceladus with Saturn's rings on Jan. 4, 2012. Jets of water ice emanating from the south polar region of the moon gleam faintly here, appearing as a small white blur below the unseen south pole, down and to the right of the moon's crescent. (The image's contrast was enhanced to increase the visibility of the jets.)
— Tom Chao
Monday, February 13, 2012: The Hubble Space Telescope shows three galaxies in this image. Two, including the tilted galaxy at the bottom and the small galaxy at top center, show spiral arms around a bright nucleus, like our own Milky Way galaxy. However, Markarian 779, the galaxy at the top of this image, possesses a distorted appearance, likely the product of a recent galactic merger between two spirals. This collision destroyed the spiral arms of the galaxies and scattered much of their gas and dust. Image released February 6, 2012.
— Tom Chao
Tuesday, February 14, 2012: NGC 6752 globular cluster has blazed for over 10 billion years as one of the most ancient collections of stars known. It has existed over twice as long as our solar system. NGC 6752 contains a high number of "blue straggler" stars, the origin of which remains a mystery. These stars display characteristics of stars younger than their neighbors. Collisions between stars in this turbulent area could produce the blue stragglers that are so prevalent. NGC 6752 lies 13,000 light-years from Earth.
— Tom Chao
Wednesday, February 15, 2012: A very long filament remained stable above the sun over a two-day period, Feb. 6-7, 2012. The filament appears here in this extreme UV light image taken by the STEREO (Ahead) spacecraft as the darker U-shaped strand, curving down from left of the top down toward the center, then back up to the right. The cooler material in the filament doesn't emit radiation at this wavelength, unlike its hotter surroundings in the corona, thus appearing dark. (The T-shaped structure to the left of the filament is a coronal hole.)
— Tom Chao
Thursday, February 16, 2012: Saturn and its moon, Dione, appear tilted in this photo taken by Cassini spacecraft. Looking at the anti-Saturn side of Dione, north is up and 20 degrees to the right. Saturn’s rings are seen from the northern, sunlit side, only one degree above the ring plane. The image was taken on Dec. 12, 2011, from a distance of approximately 35,000 miles (57,000 kilometers) from Dione.
— Tom Chao
Friday, February 17, 2012: The European Space Agency’s new Vega rocket seems to glow eerily in this low-angle shot as it begins to rise from the launch pad on its maiden voyage from Europe's spaceport in French Guiana. Vega flight VV01 lifted off at 10:00 GMT (11:00 CET, 07:00 local time) on February 13, 2012, and conducted a flawless qualification flight.
— Tom Chao
Monday, February 20, 2012: Today marks the 50th anniversary of John Glenn’s historic orbital flight in the Mercury-Atlas 6 "Friendship 7" capsule, which took place on Feb. 20, 1962. Here, the space pioneer stands with his wife, Annie, at a Senior Manager luncheon, Friday, Feb. 17, 2012, at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Annie's 92nd birthday fell on Friday as well.
— Tom Chao
Tuesday, February 21, 2012: The historic first handshake between a human and a robot in space took place aboard the International Space Station on Feb. 15, 2012. Robonaut 2, nicknamed “R2,” extended its arm and shook hands with NASA astronaut Dan Burbank, Expedition 30 commander, in the Destiny laboratory of the ISS.
— Tom Chao
Wednesday, February 22, 2012: A solar eruption and large cloud of particles blasted into space over a 10-hour period during Feb. 9-10, 2012. The orange-colored sun viewed in extreme UV light shows a filament that broke away from the sun to the right. The sun's image here was superimposed on the COR1 coronagraph (green). [See a video of the eruption.]
— Tom Chao
Thursday, February 23, 2012: Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Anton Shkaplerov, both Expedition 30 flight engineers, went spacewalking on Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012. The two men made the trip outside in order to move the Strela-1 crane from the Pirs Docking Compartment to prepare it for replacement in 2012 with a new laboratory and docking module. The duo used another boom, the Strela-2, to move the hand-operated crane to the Poisk module. Both telescoping booms are used to move massive components outside the station. The spacewalk lasted for six hours and 15 minutes.
— Tom Chao
Friday, February 24, 2012: Messier 99 (M99, NGC 4254), a spiral galaxy seen almost face-on, gleams as one of the fainter Messier objects. M99 lies in the southern part of constellation Coma Berenices, and represents one of the brighter spiral members of the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies.
— Tom Chao
Monday, February 27, 2012: AuroraMAX, the automated aurora-monitoring camera, recently caught this aurora and tweeted (as @AuroraMAX): “AURORAMAX ALERT • Latest image of aurora borealis above Yellowknife, NWT taken at 01:09 MST on February 13, 2012.”
— Tom Chao
Tuesday, February 28, 2012: Skywatcher Cliff Wassmann of Laguna Beach, CA, caught Jupiter, Venus and the moon over the pier at San Clemente, CA, on Thursday, Feb. 23.
— Tom Chao
Wednesday, February 29, 2012: Dark nebula SH2 136 usually seems spooky when viewed in subdued colors, but here appears vibrant in a photo taken by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. The star-formation region has spent its material creating new stars, which blow away clouds of residual material through the stellar winds of fast moving particles. Interesting silhouettes and reflection nebulae arise! Groovy, man!
— Tom Chao
For older Image of the Day pictures, please visit the Image of the Day archives. Above: NGC 2467.
