After sunset this gorgeous full moon rose over Brno city in the Czech Republic on July 20, 2016. The panoramic image was made during a celebration of the 47th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. A series of exposures captures the yellow hued lunar disk against the fading colors of twilight, with the 14th century Spilberk castle illuminated in the foreground. Of course, tonight’s full moon is called the Harvest Moon. The closest full moon to the northern hemisphere’s autumnal equinox, its traditional name has long been celebrated in story and song. Tonight’s full lunar phase also coincides with a subtle, penumbral lunar eclipse, the Moon passing only through the Earth’s diffuse, outer shadow.

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A wide, looping orbit brought Juno close to Jupiter on August 27. As the spacecraft swung around the giant planet’s poles JunoCam acquired these premier direct polar views, a change from the usual nearly equatorial perspective of outbound spacecraft and the telescopes of planet Earth. The sunlit side of Jupiter’s north polar region (left) was imaged about 125,000 kilometers from the cloud tops, two hours before Juno’s closest approach. An hour after close approach the south polar region was captured from 94,500 kilometers away. Strikingly different from the alternating light-colored zones and darker belts girdling more familiar equatorial regions, the polar region clouds appear more convoluted and mottled by many clockwise and counterclockwise rotating storm systems. Another 35 close orbital flybys are planned during the Juno mission.

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Many spiral galaxies have bars across their centers. Even our own Milky Way Galaxy is thought to have a modest central bar. Prominently barred spiral galaxy NGC 1672, featured here, was captured in spectacular detail in an image taken by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. Visible are dark filamentary dust lanes, young clusters of bright blue stars, red emission nebulas of glowing hydrogen gas, a long bright bar of stars across the center, and a bright active nucleus that likely houses a supermassive black hole. Light takes about 60 million years to reach us from NGC 1672, which spans about 75,000 light years across. NGC 1672, which appears toward the constellation of the Dolphinfish (Dorado), is being studied to find out how a spiral bar contributes to star formation in a galaxy’s central regions.

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A little spacecraft that was presumed lost has now been found. In 2014, the Philae lander slowly descended from its parent Rosetta spacecraft to the nucleus of Comet C67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. At the surface, after a harpoon malfunction, the lander bounced softly twice and eventually sent back images from an unknown location. Earlier this month, though, Rosetta swooped low enough to spot its cub. The meter-sized Philae is seen on the far right of the main image, with inset images showing both a zoom out and a zoom in. At the end of this month, Rosetta itself will be directed to land on 67P, but Rosetta’s landing will be harder and, although taking unique images and data, will bring the mission to an end.

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How much of planet Earth is made of water? Very little, actually. Although oceans of water cover about 70 percent of Earth’s surface, these oceans are shallow compared to the Earth’s radius. The featured illustration shows what would happen if all of the water on or near the surface of the Earth were bunched up into a ball. The radius of this ball would be only about 700 kilometers, less than half the radius of the Earth’s Moon, but slightly larger than Saturn’s moon Rhea which, like many moons in our outer Solar System, is mostly water ice. How even this much water came to be on the Earth and whether any significant amount is trapped far beneath Earth‘s surface remain topics of research.

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September’s eclipse of the Sun is documented in the 68 frames of this timelapse composite. Starting at 1pm local time a frame every 4 minutes follow’s the progress of the New Moon across the solar disk. Taken near the centerline of the narrow eclipse path, the series of exposures ends with a golden sunset. Balanced rock cairns in the foreground line a beach on the southern side of Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, near the village of Etang-Salé. Of course, the close balance in apparent size creates drama in eclipses of the Sun by the Moon as seen from planet Earth. In an annular eclipse, the Moon’s silhouette is just small enough to show the solar disk as a narrow ring-of-fire at maximum eclipse phase.

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The New Moon’s dark shadow crossed planet Earth on September 1. In silhouette the Moon didn’t quite cover the Sun though, creating an an annular solar eclipse. The shadow’s narrow central path was about 100 kilometers wide at maximum eclipse. Beginning in the South Atlantic, it tracked toward the east across Africa, ending in the Indian Ocean. Waiting on the Indian Ocean’s Reunion Island, eclipse watchers enjoyed a view just north of the eclipse centerline, the annular phase lasting a few minutes or less. Clouds threaten the nearly eclipsed Sun but create a dramatic sky in this wide-angle and telephoto composite at a partial phase from the northern side of the 50 kilometer wide island.

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Day and night on this little planet look a lot like day and night on planet Earth. In fact, the images used to construct the little planet projection, a digitally warped and stitched mosaic covering 360×180 degrees, were taken during day and night near Tarján, Hungary, planet Earth. They span a successful 33-hour-long photo experiment at July’s Hungarian Astronomical Association Astro Camp. The time-series composite follows the solar disk in 20 minute intervals from sunrise to sunset and over six hours of star trails in the northern night sky centered on the North Celestial Pole near bright star Polaris. The orbiting International Space Station traced the offset arc across the northern night. Below the little planet’s nightside horizon, red light lamps of fellow astro-campers left the night-long, dancing trails.

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The bright light at the end of this country road is actually a remarkably close conjunction of two planets. After sunset on August 27 brilliant Venus and Jupiter almost appear as a single celestial beacon in the night skyscape taken near Lake Wivenhoe, Queensland, Australia. A spectacular vertical panorama from the southern hemisphere, it shows the central Milky Way near zenith, posed on top of a pillar of Zodiacal light along the ecliptic plane. Of course Mars and Saturn are near the ecliptic too, just below the galaxy’s central bulge. Above and left of a tree on the horizon, fleeting planet Mercury also adds to the light at the end of the road.

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What is this person doing? In 2012 an annular eclipse of the Sun was visible over a narrow path that crossed the northern Pacific Ocean and several western US states. In an annular solar eclipse, the Moon is too far from the Earth to block out the entire Sun, leaving the Sun peeking out over the Moon’s disk in a ring of fire. To capture this unusual solar event, an industrious photographer drove from Arizona to New Mexico to find just the right vista. After setting up and just as the eclipsed Sun was setting over a ridge about 0.5 kilometers away, a person unknowingly walked right into the shot. Although grateful for the unexpected human element, the photographer never learned the identity of the silhouetted interloper. It appears likely, though, that the person is holding a circular device that would enable them to get their own view of the eclipse. The shot was taken at sunset on 2012 May 20 at 7:36 pm local time from a park near Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. Tomorrow another annular solar eclipse will become visible, this time along a path crossing Africa and Madagascar.

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