Pic of the Week: Annular Solar Eclipse Over Antarctica

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Image (Credit): The’ solar eclipse as seen from the Concordia research station in Antarctica on February 17, 2026. (ESA/IPEV/PNRA-A. Traverso)

This week’s image comes from the European Space Agency (ESA). It shows the “Ring of Fire” solar eclipse earlier this month from Antarctica. It was captured over the French and Italian Concordia research station.

Here is more from ESA on this image and the Concordia research station:

Peaking at 19:47 local time (12:47 CET), the Moon passed directly in front of the Sun’s centre, leaving only a thin, glowing annulus of sunlight visible. Astronomers call this moment annularity, and it lasted just two minutes, though the full partial eclipse spanned around two hours…Concordia sits 1100 km inland at an altitude of 3200 m. It is currently summer at the station: today, the Sun stayed above the horizon for nearly 20 hours, with temperatures reaching a comparatively mild –29 °C. But soon the light will fade: from May to August, the Sun will not rise at all, plunging the station into four months of continuous darkness where temperatures can fall below –80 °C. During this polar winter, the crew must live in complete isolation and full autonomy.

Pic of the Week: A Protostar in the Cepheus A Region

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The Cepheus A region, including a protostar causing much of this region’s illumination. (NASA, ESA, and R. Fedriani (Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America))

This week’s image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows the star-forming region Cepheus A in the constellation of Cepheus. This region is about 2,400 light-years away.

Here is more from NASA about this region:

The high-mass star-forming region Cepheus A hosts a collection of baby stars, including one large and luminous protostar, which accounts for about half of the region’s brightness. While much of the region is shrouded in opaque dust, light from hidden stars breaks through outflow cavities to illuminate and energize areas of gas and dust, creating pink and white nebulae. The pink area is an HII region, where the intense ultraviolet radiation of the nearby stars has converted the surrounding clouds of gas into glowing, ionized hydrogen.

Pic of the Week: Another View of the Milky Way

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The Milky Way galaxy in radio waves as seen from the Southern Hemisphere. (Silvia Mantovanini and the GLEAM-X Team)

The image above was released late last year. It shows the Milky Way galaxy in radio-color captured by astronomers from the International Centre of Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). All of this was part of the GaLactic and Extragalactic All-sky MWA (GLEAM) and GLEAM-X (GLEAM eXtended) surveys conducted over 28 nights in 2013 and 2014 as well as 113 nights from 2018 to 2020.

In describing the image, Silvia Mantovanini, one of the astronomers analyzing the survey data, noted:

You can clearly identify remnants of exploded stars, represented by large red circles. The smaller blue regions indicate stellar nurseries where new stars are actively forming.

In this video, you can hear more from astronomers Silvia Mantovanini and Natasha Hurley-Walker who co-wrote a paper on this work titled GaLactic and extragalactic all-sky Murchison Widefield Array survey eXtended (GLEAM-X) III: Galactic plane.

Pic of the Week: Close-Up View of the Helix Nebula

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Image (Credit): Part of the Helix Nebula as captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

This week’s image from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) shows an up-close view of the Helix Nebula, which is about 650 light years away. Taken by the JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera, we see the colors of the gases moving away from the exploding star.

NASA notes:

Here, blistering winds of fast-moving hot gas from the dying star are crashing into slower moving colder shells of dust and gas that were shed earlier in its life, sculpting the nebula’s remarkable structure…A blazing white dwarf, the leftover core of the dying star, lies right at the heart of the nebula…Its intense radiation lights up the surrounding gas, creating a rainbow of features: hot ionized gas closest to the white dwarf, cooler molecular hydrogen farther out, and protective pockets where more complex molecules can begin to form within dust clouds. This interaction is vital, as it’s the raw material from which new planets may one day form in other star systems.

Below is a wider view of the nebula from which the image above is taken.

Image (Credit): The full view of the Helix Nebula, taken by the ground-based Visible and Infrared Telescope for Astronomy as well as the JWST’s more focused view. (ESO, VISTA, NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Emerson (ESO); Acknowledgment: CASU)

Pic of the Week: Preparing for the Artemis II Mission

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Image (Credit): NASA’s SLS and Orion spacecraft moving from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center. (NASA)

This week’s image shows NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft making its way from the Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B via the crawler-transporter. All of this is in preparation for the Artemis II mission, which will take four astronauts around the Moon. The flight could launch as early as February 6th.

NASA has reported that the Artemis II mission will include various items to mark the 250th anniversary of the United States, including:

  • a 1-inch by-1-inch swatch of muslin fabric from the original Wright Flyer the Wright Brothers used to make the first powered flight in 1903;
  • a 13-by-8-inch American flag, which flew with the first shuttle mission, STS-1, the final shuttle mission, STS-135, and NASA’s first crewed test flight of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX Demo-2;
  • a flag that was set to fly on NASA’s Apollo 18 mission is included in the flight kit and will make its premiere flight with Orion;
  • a 4-by-5-inch negative of a photo from the Ranger 7 mission, the first U.S. mission to successfully make contact with the lunar surface;
  • soil samples collected from the base of established Artemis I Moon Trees planted at NASA’s 10 centers;
  • an SD card including the millions of names of those who participated in the “Send Your Name to Space” campaign, bringing the public along on this journey; and
  • items from several NASA partners.