Images from

NASA

An active region just about squarely facing Earth erupted with an X 1.6 flare (largest class) as well as a coronal mass ejection on Sept. 10. The flare lasted longer than usual and sent out a burst of radiation into space.

This picture, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), shows a galaxy known as NGC 6872 in the constellation of Pavo (The Peacock).

NASA's DHC-3 Otter plane flies in Operation IceBridge-Alaska surveys of mountain glaciers in Alaska in this image released on September 18. Over the past few decades, average global temperatures have been on the rise, and this warming is happening two to three times faster in the Arctic.

At about 10:45 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time (MDT) on September 14, Hurricane Odile made landfall as a Category 3 storm near Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. According to the U.S. National Hurricane Center, Odile arrived with wind speeds of 110 knots (204 kilometers or 127 miles per hour). The storm tied Olivia (1967) as the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the state of Baja California Sur in the satellite era. 

Far beyond the stars in the constellation of Leo (The Lion) is irregular galaxy IC 559. IC 559 is not your everyday galaxy. With its irregular shape and bright blue spattering of stars, it is a fascinating galactic anomaly. It may look like sparse cloud, but it is in fact full of gas and dust which is spawning new stars.

An illustration of the supermassive black hole located in the middle of the very dense galaxy M60-UCD1. It weighs as much as 21 million times the mass of our Sun. Lying about 50 million light-years away, M60-UCD1 is a tiny galaxy with a diameter of 300 light-years just 1/500th of the diameter of the Milky Way! Despite its size it is pretty crowded, containing some 140 million stars.

The sun emitted a significant solar flare, peaking at 1:48 p.m. EDT on Sept. 10. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured images of the event. Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation.

The fire season in California has been anything but cooperative this year. Hot conditions combined with a state-wide drought and dry lightning makes for unpleasant conditions and leads to an abundance of forest fires.NASA's Aqua satellite collected this natural-color image with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, MODIS, instrument on September 15.

This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a beautiful spiral galaxy known as PGC 54493, located in the constellation of Serpens (The Serpent). This galaxy is part of a galaxy cluster that has been studied by astronomers exploring an intriguing phenomenon known as weak gravitational lensing.

On August 22, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Terra satellite captured a true-color image of a sunny summer day in Iceland. While most of the winter snow has melted to reveal green vegetation, the rugged northern peaks retain a snow cap.