NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

April 20, 2025

The Orion Nebula in Visible and Infrared

The Great Nebula in Orion is a colorful place. Visible to the unaided eye, it appears as a small fuzzy patch in the constellation of Orion. Long exposure, multi-wavelength images like this, however, show the Orion Nebula to be a busy neighborhood of young stars, hot gas, and dark dust. This digital composite features not only three colors of visible light but four colors of infrared light taken by NASA's orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope as well. The power behind much of the Orion Nebula (M42) is the Trapezium - four of the brightest stars in the nebula. Many of the filamentary structures visible are actually shock waves - fronts where fast moving material encounters slow moving gas. The Orion Nebula spans about 40 light years and is located about 1500 light years away in the same spiral arm of our Galaxy as the Sun.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Astronaut Returns to Earth on 70th Birthday with Soyuz Crew

April 19, 2025

At 9:20 p.m. EDT (6:20 a.m. Kazakhstan time, Sunday, April 20), the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft made a parachute-assisted landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan, southeast of the town of Dzhezkazgan.

Spanning 220 days in space, NASA astronaut Don Pettit and his crewmates, Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, orbited the Earth 3,520 times and completed a journey of 93.3 million miles over the course of their mission.

The Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft launched and docked to the station on Sept. 11, 2024.

This was Pettit’s fourth spaceflight, where he served as flight engineer for Expedition 71 and 72. He has a career total of 590 days in orbit.

Ovchinin completed his fourth flight in space, totaling 595 days, and Vagner has earned an overall total of 416 days in space during two trips to the orbiting laboratory.

The three crew members will fly on a helicopter from the landing site to the recovery staging city of Karaganda, Kazakhstan.

Pettit will board a NASA plane and return to Houston, while Ovchinin and Vagner will depart for a training base in Star City, Russia.

https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacestation/2025/04/19/astronaut-returns-to-earth-on-70th-birthday-with-soyuz-crew/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DmBm9gP460

>>22935811

chekt

the Pepebula nebula in infrakek