The setting moon

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A long exposure image has captured star trails and the setting moon above the coast of Atlantic Ocean, Lüderitz, Namibia.

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The autumn Milky Way and rising winter stars over the Grand Canyon. Red airglow brightens the horizon. Click the image-top constellation icon to see a west-looking image at this night with the Summer Triangle above the canyon. The Grand Canyon, a World Heritage Site in the American southwest at the border of Arizona and Utah, is the longest canyon on the Earth (446 km), a steep-sided gorge carved by the Colorado River steadily in millions of years.

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As seen on Astronomy Picture of the Day, in this Milky Way image from Indian Himalayas there is a new star, a nova, in the middle of the Sagittarius Teapot. Click the image-top constellation icon to spot it. The erupted nova (named Sagittarii 2015 No. 2) reached magnitude 4 in March 2015, visible to naked eye. A nova is a cataclysmic nuclear explosion on a white dwarf (in a binary system), which causes a sudden massive brightening of the star. It is different from supernova, a smaller phenomenon that does not happen at the core of an old massive star and it does not destroy the star.

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The Milky Way towards the galactic center stands above the 8.2 m Subaru telescope (operated by Japan) on Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. Subaru is the Japanese term for Pleiades (the Seven Sisters star cluster).