Stellary Starry Universe

Although it was past 2 a.m. on Dec. 29, 1968, more than 2,000 people were on hand at Ellington Air Force Base to welcome the members of the Apollo 8 crew back home. Astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders had just flown to Houston from the Pacific recovery area near Hawaii. The three crewmen of the historic Apollo 8 lunar orbit mission are standing at the microphones in center of picture. Image Credit: NASA

Although it was past 2 a.m. on Dec. 29, 1968, more than 2,000 people were on hand at Ellington Air Force Base to welcome the members of the Apollo 8 crew back home. Astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders had just flown to Houston from the Pacific recovery area near Hawaii. The three crewmen of the historic Apollo 8 lunar orbit mission are standing at the microphones in center of picture. Image Credit: NASA

NASA’s twin spacecraft to study the moon from crust to core are nearing their New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day main-engine burns to place the duo in lunar orbit.

This artist’s concept pictures the fastest rotating star found to date. The massive, bright young star, called VFTS 102, rotates at a million miles per hour, or 100 times faster than our sun does. Centrifugal forces from this dizzying spin rate have flattened the star into an oblate shape and spun off a disk of hot plasma, seen edge on in this view from a hypothetical planet. The star may have “spun up” by accreting material from a binary companion star. The rapidly evolving companion later exploded as a supernova. The whirling star lies 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

This view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft looks toward the south polar region of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and shows a depression within the moon’s orange and blue haze layers near the south pole. The moon’s high altitude haze layer appears blue here; whereas, the main atmospheric haze is orange. The difference in color could be due to particle size of the haze. The blue haze likely consists of smaller particles than the orange haze. The depressed or attenuated layer appears in the transition area between the orange and blue hazes about a third of the way in from the left edge of the narrow-angle image. The moon’s south pole is in the upper right of this image. This view suggests Titan’s north polar vortex, or hood, is beginning to flip from north to south. The southern pole of Titan is going into darkness as the sun advances towards the north with each passing day. The upper layer of Titan’s hazes is still illuminated by sunlight. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural color view. The images were obtained on Sept. 11, 2011 at a distance of approximately 83,000 miles (134,000 kilometers) from Titan. Image scale is 2,581 feet (787 meters) per pixel. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute