Planetary Picture of the Day - Week of May 19, 2025

Rubin Observatory basks in the glow of this vibrant sunset from April 2025. From atop its perch on Cerro Pachón in Chile, Rubin will repeatedly scan the entire southern hemisphere sky for a decade, generating the greatest cosmic movie of the Universe ever made.

This sequence shows the irradiated protoplanetary disk (proplyd) 177-341 W in the Orion Nebula, captured in unprecedented detail by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Each panel isolates light from specific elements—hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen—unravelling the physical and chemical conditions in which planets in high-UV environments form. Every part of the system is distinguished for the first time, including the disk in the carbon emission line. As opposed to previous proplyd images, this sequence was captured by a ground-based observatory.

Astronaut Don Pettit took this photo from space on Jan. 27, 2025, as the Sun began to rise over a cloudy Pacific Ocean. This long-exposure image shows off the broad band of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, above the aurora and airglow that shine closer to Earth's horizon.

This view from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, stitched together from 28 images, was captured after the rover ascended the steep slope of a geologic feature called “Greenheugh Pediment.” In the distance at the top of the image is the floor of Gale Crater near a region called Aeolis Dorsa that researchers believe was once a massive ocean.