I hadn't intended to do another astronomy post so soon after the last one, but I've come across pictures that are just too interesting to withhold.
This one (above) appears to be a lump of clay shaped by a palette knife, but it's actually a comet called 67P Churyumorov. A probe named Rosetta just arrived there and is now in orbit attempting to locate a landing site for its robot lander. The comet is only 4 kilometers in length but that's enough to cause very serious damage if it ever hit the Earth.
Here's Saturn being eclipsed by a shadow from, of all things, our own Moon.
It's strange to recall that only a couple of decades ago the proposition that underground moisture existed on Mars was considered controversial. Nowadays the evidence seems to jump out at us with every new batch of photographs.
Here's (above) a 5 kilometer high mesa on Mars which has undergone a collapse, possibly due to groundwater undermining a layer of subterranean salt. Some kind of dark material is revealed and some of it seems to have been carried down to the ground in a pattern possibly influenced by a liquid.
Here's (above) an odd one. It's Galaxy M106, about 23 million light years distant. Those purple spider legs appear at first glance to be carrying material away from the center but actually they're doing the opposite. They're jets fast-tracking matter
into a super massive black hole in the galaxy's center. How can the jets be as large as they are?
