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MXPlank Picture Of The Day Archive



YEAR - 2024




**** Extremely sorry for some of the missing dates in the year. We will try to keep it as continuous as possible****





Image Of The Day 2024-11-24 :
Galaxies abound in this spectacular Hubble image; spiral arms swirl in all colours and orientations, and fuzzy ellipticals can be seen speckled across the frame as softly glowing smudges on the sky. Each visible speck of a galaxy is home to countless stars. A few stars closer


Image Of The Day 2024-11-21 :
This Picture of the Week shows the colourful globular cluster NGC 2108. The cluster is nestled within the Large Magellanic Cloud, in the constellation of the Swordfis


Image Of The Day 2024-11-10 :
Obtained for a research programme on star formation in old and distant galaxies, this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image obtained with its Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) demonstrates the immense effects of gravity; more specifically, it shows the effects of gravitational lensing caused by an object called SDSS J1152+3313. Gravitational lenses — such as this galaxy cluster SDSS J1152+3313


Image Of The Day 2024-11-07 :
This image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) shows a beautiful spiral galaxy called NGC 6744. At first glance, it resembles our Milky Way albeit larger, measuring more than 200


Image Of The Day 2024-11-03 :
At first glance, it may seem as though this image was taken through a faulty lens, but the mind-bending distortions visible in this Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 impressive image are actually caused by a cosmic phenomenon. The bright object at the centre of the frame is the galaxy c


Image Of The Day 2024-11-02 :
Glowing warmly against the dark backdrop of the Universe, this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows an irregular galaxy called UGC 12682. Located approximately 70 million light-years away in the constellation of


Image Of The Day 2024-09-30 :
This busy image is a treasure trove of wonders. Bright stars from the Milky Way sparkle in the foreground, the magnificent swirls of se


Image Of The Day 2024-09-29 :
This rich and dense smattering of stars is a massive globular cluster, a gravitationally-bound collection of stars that orbits the Milky Way. Globular clusters are denser and more spherical than open star cluster


Image Of The Day 2024-09-11 :
In astronomy, the devil is in the details — as this image, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide-Field Camera 3, demonstrates. The numerous fuzzy blobs and glowing shapes scattered across this image mak


Image Of The Day 2024-09-08 :
This sparkling Picture of the Week features a massive galaxy cluster named RXC J0232.2-4420. This image was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide-F


Image Of The Day 2024-09-06 :
A ripple of bright blue threads through this galaxy like a misshapen lake system. The foreground of this image is littered with nearby stars with their


Image Of The Day 2024-08-29 :
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a cluster of hundreds of galaxies located about 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. The brightest galaxy within this cluster


Image Of The Day 2024-08-27 :
At first glance, this image is dominated by the vibrant glow of the swirling spiral to the lower left of the frame. However, this galaxy is far from the most interesting spectacle here — behind i


Image Of The Day 2024-08-22 :
Resembling a wizard’s staff set aglow, NGC 1032 cleaves the quiet darkness of space in two in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. NGC 1032 is located about a hundred million light years away in t


Image Of The Day 2024-08-20 :
In the darkness of the distant Universe, galaxies resemble glowing fireflies, flickering candles, charred embers floating up from a bonfire, light bulbs softly shining. This Picture of the Week, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, sho


Image Of The Day 2024-08-16 :
Though the bright, light-speckled foreground galaxy on the left is eye-catching, it is far from the most intriguing object in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. In the upper part of the frame, the light from distant galaxies has been s


Image Of The Day 2024-08-14 :
 

This pretty, cloud-like object may not look much like a galaxy — it lacks the well-defined arms of a spiral galaxy, or the reddish bulge of an elliptical — but it is in fact something known as a lenticular galaxy. Lenticular galaxies sit somewhere between the spiral and elliptical types;



Image Of The Day 2024-08-13 :
This intriguing image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a massive galaxy cluster called PSZ2 G138.61-10.84, about six billion light-years away. Galaxies are not randomly distributed in space


Image Of The Day 2024-08-12 :
 

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a massive galaxy cluster glowing brightly in the darkness. Despite its beauty, this cluster bears the distinctly unpoetic name of PL



Image Of The Day 2024-08-11 :
This image is packed full of galaxies! A keen eye can spot exquisite ellipticals and spectacular spirals, seen at various orientations: edge-on with the plane of the galaxy visible, face-on to show off magnificent spiral arms, and everything in between. The vast majority of these specks are galaxies, but to spot a foregro


Image Of The Day 2024-08-09 :

This image, captured by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the spiral galaxy NGC 5714, about 130 million light-years away in the constellation of Boötes (the Herdsman). NGC 5714 is classified as a Sc spiral galaxy, but its spiral arms — th



Image Of The Day 2024-08-08 :
  This idyllic scene, packed with glowing galaxies, has something truly remarkable at its core: an untouched relic of the ancient Universe. This relic can be seen in the large galaxy at the centre of the frame, a lenti


Image Of The Day 2024-08-07 :
This stunning image from Hubble shows the majestic galaxy NGC 1015, found nestled within the constellation of Cetus (The Whale) 118 million light-years from Earth. In this image, we see NGC 1015 face-on, with its beautifully symmetrical swir


Image Of The Day 2024-08-06 :
This enchanting spiral galaxy can be found in the constellation of Ursa Major (the Great Bear). Star-studded NGC 3972 lies about 65 million light-years away from the Earth, meaning tha


Image Of The Day 2024-08-05 :

Discovered in 1900 by astronomer DeLisle Stewart and here imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, IC 4710 is an undeniably spectacular sight. The galaxy is a busy cloud of bright stars, with bright pockets — mark



Image Of The Day 2024-08-04 :
Neptune, the eighth and farthest planet from the Sun, was visited for the first and last time by NASA’s Voyager 2 mission in 1989. Since then, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has been attempting to unearth the


Image Of The Day 2024-08-02 :
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the galaxy cluster PLCK G004.5-19.5. It was discovered by the ESA Planck satellite through the Sunyaev-Zel’dovic


Image Of The Day 2024-07-31 :
Roughly 50 million light-years away lies a somewhat overlooked little galaxy named NGC 1559. Pictured here by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3, this barred spiral lies in the littl


Image Of The Day 2024-07-30 :

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a spiral galaxy known as NGC 7331. First spotted by the prolific galaxy hunter William Herschel in 1784, NGC 733



Image Of The Day 2024-07-28 :
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals a glistening and ancient globular cluster named NGC 3201 — a gathering of hundreds of thousands of stars bound together by gravity. NGC 3201 was discovered in 1826 by the Scottish astronomer James Dunl


Image Of The Day 2024-07-27 :
Researchers using a suite of telescopes including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have spotted a supermassive black hole blowing huge bubbles of hot, bright gas — one bubble is currently expanding outwards from the black hole, while another older bubble slowly fades away. This cosmic behemoth sits within the galaxy at the bottom of this image, which lies 900 million light-years fro


Image Of The Day 2024-07-26 :
In 2014, astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope found that this enormous galaxy cluster contains the mass of a staggering three million billion Suns — so it’s little wonder that it has earned the nickname of “El Gordo” (“the Fat One” in Spanish)! Known officially as ACT-CLJ0102-4915, it is the largest, hottest, and X-ray brightest galaxy cluster ever discovered in the distant Universe. Galaxy clusters are the largest objects in the Universe that are boun


Image Of The Day 2024-07-25 :
This image, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), shows a galaxy named UGC 6093. As can be easily seen, UGC 6093 is something known as a barred spiral galaxy — it has be


Image Of The Day 2024-07-19 :
This image shows something spectacular: a massive galaxy cluster that it is warping the space around it! The cluster, whose heart is at the centre of the frame, is named RCS2 J2327, and is one of the most massive clusters known at its distance or beyond. Massive objects such as RCS2 J2327 have such a strong influence on their surroundings that they visibly warp the space a


Image Of The Day 2024-07-18 :
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of a blizzard of stars, which resembles a swirling storm in a snow globe. These stars make up the globular cluster Messier 79, located about


Image Of The Day 2024-07-17 :

Galaxies glow like fireflies in this spectacular NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image! This flickering swarm of cosmic fireflies is a rich cluster of galaxies called Abell 2163. Abell 2163 is a member of the Abell catalogue



Image Of The Day 2024-07-15 :
Don’t be fooled! The subject of this Picture of the Week, ESO 580-49, may seem tranquil and unassuming, but this spiral galaxy actually displays some explosive tendencies. In October of 2011, a cataclysmic burst of high-energy gamma-ray ra


Image Of The Day 2024-07-13 :

This picturesque view from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope peers into the distant Universe to reveal a galaxy cluster called Abell 2537.

Galaxy clusters such as this one contain t



Image Of The Day 2024-07-12 :
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals the Cosmic Snake, a distant galaxy peppered with clumpy regions of intense star formation that appear warped by the effect of gravitational lensing. This giant arc-like galaxy is actually behind the huge galaxy cluster MACSJ1206.2-0847,


Image Of The Day 2024-07-11 :

This new Picture of the Week, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the dwarf galaxy NGC 4625, located about 30 million light-years away in the constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs). The image, acquired with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS)



Image Of The Day 2024-07-10 :

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image seems to sink into the screen, plunging the viewer into the dark depths of the early Universe. Massive galaxy clusters — such as the su



Image Of The Day 2024-07-09 :

The Universe contains some truly massive objects. Although we are still unsure how such gigantic things come to be, the current le



Image Of The Day 2024-07-07 :

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is chock-full of galaxies — each glowing speck is a different galaxy, bar the bright flash in the middle of the image which is actually a star lying within our own galaxy that just happened to be in the way. At the centre of the image lies something especially interesting, the cen



Image Of The Day 2024-07-02 :

This image, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows what happens when two galaxies become one. The twisted cosmic knot seen here is NGC 2623 — or Arp 243 —<



Image Of The Day 2024-07-01 :

As far as galaxies are concerned, size can be deceptive. Some of the largest galaxies in the Universe are dormant



Image Of The Day 2024-06-29 :

At a distance of just 160 000 light-years, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is one of the Milky Way’s closest companions. It is also home to one of the largest and most intense regions of activ



Image Of The Day 2024-06-28 :

The distances to objects in the Universe can differ enormously. The nearest star to us — Proxima Centauri — lies som



Image Of The Day 2024-06-27 :

Despite the advances made in past decades, the process of galaxy formation remains an open question in astronomy. Various theories have been suggested, but since galaxies come in all shapes an



Image Of The Day 2024-06-25 :

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope picture shows NGC 5398, a barred spiral galaxy located about 55 million light-years away.

The galaxy is famous for containing an especi



Image Of The Day 2024-06-23 :

Like firecrackers lighting up the sky on New Year’s Eve, the majestic spiral arms of NGC 5559 are alight with new stars being born. NGC 5559 is a spiral galaxy, with spiral arms filled with gas and dust sweep



Image Of The Day 2024-06-22 :

Phenomena across the Universe emit radiation spanning the entire electromagnetic spectrum — from high-energy gamma rays, which stream out from the most energetic events in the cosmos, to lower-energy microwaves and radio waves.

Microwaves, the very same radiation that can heat up your dinner,



Image Of The Day 2024-06-20 :

NGC 178 may be small, but it packs quite a punch. Measuring around 40 000 light-years across, its diameter is less than hal



Image Of The Day 2024-06-19 :

Gravity governs the movements of the cosmos. It draws flocks of galaxies together to form small groups



Image Of The Day 2024-06-17 :

The subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is a dwarf galaxy named NGC 5949. Thanks to its proximity to Earth — it sits at a distance of around 44 mill



Image Of The Day 2024-06-15 :

The star of this Hubble Picture of the Week is a galaxy known as NGC 4656, located in the constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs). However, it also has a somewhat more interesting and intriguing name: the Hock



Image Of The Day 2024-06-13 :

This beautiful clump of glowing gas, dark dust, and glittering stars is the spiral galaxy NGC 4248, located about 24 million light-years away in the constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs).

This image was produced by the



Image Of The Day 2024-06-07 :

Tucked away in the small northern constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs) is the galaxy NGC 4242, shown here as seen by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The galaxy lies some 30 million light-years from us. At this distance



Image Of The Day 2024-06-05 :

Discovered by British astronomer William Herschel over 200 years ago, NGC 2500 lies about 30  million light-years away in the northern constellation of Lynx. As this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope ima



Image Of The Day 2024-06-04 :

IC 342 is a challenging cosmic target. Although it is bright, the galaxy sits near the equator of the Milky Way’s ga



Image Of The Day 2024-05-31 :

Not all galaxies have the luxury of possessing a simple moniker or quirky nickname. The subject of this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope



Image Of The Day 2024-05-30 :
The object in the middle of this image, sitting alone within a star-studded cosmos, is a galaxy known as ESO 486-21. ESO 486-21 is a spiral galaxy — albeit with a somewhat irregular and ill-


Image Of The Day 2024-05-29 :
A century ago, Albert Einstein published his famous theory of relativity. He proposed that all objects physically warp the fabric of space, with la


Image Of The Day 2024-05-28 :
This seemingly unspectacular series of dots with varying distances between them actually shows the slow waltz of two brown dwarfs. The image is a stack of 12 images made over the course of three years


Image Of The Day 2024-05-26 :
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is famous for its jaw-dropping snapshots of the cosmos. At first glance this Picture of the Week appears to be quite the opposite, showi


Image Of The Day 2024-05-25 :

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope still has a few tricks up its sleeve in its task of exploring the Universe. For one, it is able to image two adjacent parts of the sky simultaneousl



Image Of The Day 2024-05-23 :
This captivating new image shows the Crab Nebula in bright neon colours. The unusual image was produced by combining data from telescopes s


Image Of The Day 2024-05-20 :
This image from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) shows a spiral galaxy NGC 5917, perhaps best known for its intriguing interactions with its neighbouring galaxy MCG-01-39-003 (not visible here, but located off the bottom right of the frame — as seen here). Mass is often confused with weight, but they are very different thin


Image Of The Day 2024-05-19 :

This entrancing image shows a few of the tenuous threads that comprise Sh2-308, a faint and wispy shell of gas located 5200 light-years away in the constellation of Canis Major (The Great Dog).

Sh2-308 is a large bubble-like structure wrapped arou



Image Of The Day 2024-05-19 :

This entrancing image shows a few of the tenuous threads that comprise Sh2-308, a faint and wispy shell of gas located 5200 light-years away in the constellation of Canis Major (The Great Dog).

Sh2-308 is a large bubble-like structure wrapp



Image Of The Day 2024-05-17 :

Despite all efforts galaxy formation and evolution are still far from being fully understood. Fortunately, the conditions we see within certain galaxies — such as so-



Image Of The Day 2024-05-16 :
Ever since Voyager 2 beamed home spectacular images of the planets in the 1980s, planet-lovers have been hooked on extra-terrestrial aurorae. Aurorae are caused by streams of charged particles like electrons, that come f


Image Of The Day 2024-05-13 :

Some astronomical objects have endearing or quirky nicknames, inspired by mythology or their own appearance. Take, for example, the constellation of Orion (The Hunter), the



Image Of The Day 2024-05-12 :

Some galaxies are harder to classify than others. Here, Hubble’s trusty Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) has captured a striking view



Image Of The Day 2024-05-11 :

This image from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) shows NGC 1448, a spiral galaxy located about 50 million light-years from Earth in the little-known constellation of Horologium (The Pendulum Clock). We tend to think of spiral galaxies as massive and roughly circular celestial



Image Of The Day 2024-05-10 :

Light travels through space at just under 300 000 kilometres per second! This staggering speed is used to calculate astronomical distances; although often misinterpreted as a unit of time (due to its misleading name), a light-year is actually a unit of astronomical distance, and is defined as the distance that light travels in a year. For reference, this is around nine trillion kilometres<



Image Of The Day 2024-05-09 :
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image showcases the remarkable galaxy UGC 12591. Classified as an S0/Sa galaxy, UGC 12591 sits somewhere between a lenticular and a


Image Of The Day 2024-05-08 :
The events surrounding the Big Bang were so cataclysmic that they left an indelible imprint on the fabric of the cosmos. We can detect these scars today by observing the oldest light in the Universe.


Image Of The Day 2024-05-07 :

This image was captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), a highly efficient wide-field camera covering the optical and near-infrared parts of the spectrum. While this lovely image contains hundreds of distant stars and galaxies, one vital t



Image Of The Day 2024-05-06 :

Not to be confused with our neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy, the Andromeda constellation is one of the 88 modern constellations. More importantly for this image, it is home to the pictured NGC 7640.



Image Of The Day 2024-05-04 :
The Calabash Nebula, pictured here — which has the technical name OH 231.8+04.2 — is a spectacular example of the death of a low-mass star like t


Image Of The Day 2024-05-03 :

The lesser-known constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs), is home to a variety of deep-sky objects — including this beautiful galaxy, known as NGC 4861. Astronomers are still debating on how to classify it: While its physical properties —



Image Of The Day 2024-05-02 :

This stunning image, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), shows part of the sky in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer). The region is rendered in exquisite detail — deep red and bright blue stars



Image Of The Day 2024-05-01 :

This image taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures a galaxy in the Virgo constellation. This camera was installed in 2002, and its wide field of view is double that of its prede



Image Of The Day 2024-04-29 :

This delicate smudge in deep space is far more turbulent than it first appears. Known as IRAS 14348-1447 — a name  derived in part from that of its disco



Image Of The Day 2024-04-27 :
 

This galaxy has a far more exciting and futuristic classification than most — it is a megamaser. Megamasers are intensely bright, around 100 million times brighter than t



Image Of The Day 2024-04-25 :
On a clear evening in April of 1789, the renowned astronomer William Herschel continued his unrelenting survey of the night sky, hunting for new cosmic objects — and found cause to celebrate! Lengthening his impressive list of cosmic discoveries yet again, the astronomer spotted this bright spiral galaxy, named NGC 4707, lurking in the constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dog). NGC 4707 lies roughly 22 million light-years from Earth. Over tw


Image Of The Day 2024-04-24 :
In 1900, astronomer Joseph Lunt made a discovery: Peering through a telescope at Cape Town Observatory, the British–South African scientist spotted this beautiful sight in the southern constellation of Grus (The Crane): a barred spiral galaxy now named IC 5201. Over a century later, the galaxy is still of interest to astronomers. F


Image Of The Day 2024-04-23 :

The constellation of Virgo (The Virgin) is especially rich in galaxies, due in part to the presence of a massive and gravitationally-bound collection of over 1300 galaxies called the Virgo Cluster. One particular member of this cosmic community, NGC 4388, is captured in this im



Image Of The Day 2024-04-22 :

This delicate blue group of stars — actually an irregular galaxy named IC 3583 — sits some 30 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin).

It may seem to have no discernable structure, but IC 3583



Image Of The Day 2024-04-21 :
This image of the spiral galaxy NGC 3274 comes courtesy of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Hubble’s WFC3 vision spreads from the ultraviolet light through to the nea


Image Of The Day 2024-04-20 :
This Hubble image shows NGC 4789A, a dwarf irregular galaxy in the constellation of Coma Berenices. It certainly lives up to its name — the stars that call this galaxy


Image Of The Day 2024-04-19 :

NGC 1222, seen in this image taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 on board the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST), is a galaxy with a rather eventful story to tell. NGC 1222 has been described as a peculiar example of a type of galaxy



Image Of The Day 2024-04-17 :
 

In 1054 AD, during the Song dynasty, Chinese astronomers spotted a bright new star in the night sky. This newcomer turned out to be a violent explosion within the Milky Way, caused by the spe



Image Of The Day 2024-04-16 :

Globular clusters offer some of the most spectacular sights in the night sky. These ornate spheres contain hundreds of thousands of stars, and reside



Image Of The Day 2024-04-15 :
It may be famous for hosting spectacular sights such as the Tucana Dwarf Galaxy and 47 Tucanae (heic1510), the second brightest globular cluster in the night sky, but the southern constellation of Tucana (The Toucan) also possesses a variety of unsung cosmic beauties. One such beauty is NGC 299, an open star cluster located within the Small


Image Of The Day 2024-04-14 :
This image, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, shows a spiral galaxy named NGC 278. This cosmic beauty lies some 38 million light-years away in the northern constellation


Image Of The Day 2024-04-14 :
  This Hubble image shows the central region of a spiral galaxy known as NGC 247. NGC 247 is a relatively small spiral galaxy in the southern constellatio


Image Of The Day 2024-04-13 :
  This shining disc of a spiral galaxy sits approximately 25 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Sculptor. Named NGC 24, the galaxy was discovered by British astronomer William Herschel


Image Of The Day 2024-04-12 :
This intriguing new image captured with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a dust-bathed cluster of fragments from a disintegrated comet. The comet in question, named 332P/Ikeya-Murakami, split into this


Image Of The Day 2024-04-11 :
A lone source shines out brightly from the dark expanse of deep space, glowing softly against a picturesque backdrop of distant stars and colourful galaxies. Captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera




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