What A Trillion Stars Look Like; A Sharp View Of The Andromeda Galaxy. From Twitter @ WorldAndScience

A Solar Filament Erupts : What’s happened to our Sun? Nothing very unusual – it just threw a filament. Toward the middle of 2012, a long standing solar filament suddenly erupted into space producing an energetic Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). The filament had been held up for days by the Sun’s ever changing magnetic field and the timing of the eruption was unexpected. Watched closely by the Sun-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory, the resulting explosion shot electrons and ions into the Solar System, some of which arrived at Earth three days later and impacted Earth’s magnetosphere, causing visible aurorae. Loops of plasma surrounding an active region can be seen above the erupting filament in the featured ultraviolet image. Although the Sun is now in a relatively inactive state of its 11-year cycle, unexpected holes have opened in the Sun’s corona allowing an excess of charged particles to stream into space. As before, these charged particles are creating auroras. via NASA

Starburst Galaxy M94 from Hubble

A stunning view of the planet at night from an altitude of 240 miles, it was recorded on March 28, 2012. The lights of Moscow, Russia are near picture center and one of the station’s solar panel arrays is on the left.

Image Credit: ISS Expedition 30, NASA

On September 9th 1995, the legendary Playstation console launched in North America!

Like a paintbrush caressing the rings of Saturn, wee moon Daphnis has just enough gravity to make a ripple. (at NASA’s Cassini Mission to Saturn)

Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage!

“In celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s deployment in April 2011, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute pointed Hubble’s eye to an especially photogenic group of interacting galaxies called Arp 273.

The larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, has a disk that is tidally distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. A swath of blue jewels across the top is the combined light from clusters of intensely bright and hot young blue stars. These massive stars glow fiercely in ultraviolet light.

The smaller, nearly edge-on companion shows distinct signs of intense star formation at its nucleus, perhaps triggered by the encounter with the companion galaxy.”

Credit- nasa.gov