BEAUTY AND PASSION.....

The Red Center of Australia

Image courtesy Envisat/ESA

A veil of white clouds hovers over the crimson soil and sparse greenery of Australia's Lake Eyre Basin, aka the Red Center, in a newly released picture taken in July by the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite.

The basin, one of the world's largest internally draining regions, covers roughly 463,000 square miles (1.2 million square kilometers)—an area equivalent in size to France, Germany, and Italy combined.

"Melting" Nebula

Image courtesy ESA/NASA

Pillars of cold gas seem to melt in the hot radiation from nearby stars in a picture of the Carina nebula released September 16. The Hubble Space Telescope shot captures light emitted by hydrogen and oxygen atoms in the gas clouds.

The Carina nebula is a star-forming region 7,500 light-years from Earth. 

Massive stars in the nebula are constantly emitting streams of charged particles, which sculpt the surrounding gases and dust. Inside the darker, denser regions, new stars are likely being born.

The space shuttle Discovery rides toward Launch Pad A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida Monday night, as seen from the roof of the launch control center.

Discovery is slated to launch in early November on a supply run to the International Space Station. The mission, called STS-133, is currently the next-to-last flight scheduled for NASA's shuttle program, which is due to end early next year.

Waves of dust and gas wash over bright stars at the heart of the Lagoon Nebula in a Hubble Space Telescope picture released September 22. The composite image shows glowing hydrogen (red), nitrogen (green), and starlight (blue).

Recent studies of the nebula have helped build support for theories of star birth. Astronomers had calculated that growing stars would occasionally shoot out long tendrils of matter from their poles, and in the past five years, several examples of these stellar jets have been seen in the Lagoon.

A newly released picture taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter"Happy Face" crater, due to a "smiling" set of mountains and smaller craters inside the impact basin. shows "wrinkled" rocks on the floor of Galle crater, also called the

Pictured coated with frost in February 2007, the wrinkles are actually vast layers of rock cut by long cracks or, in some places, fractured into blocks.

You're OK, Scorpius

Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE

A cold cloud of dust and gas seems to give the "OK" sign to the star Pi Scorpii in a composite infrared picture released September 21 by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mission.

Also called DG 129, the cloud is a reflection nebula—meaning it glows not from within but by reflecting light from nearby stars. Pi Scorpii is the bright star at right surrounded by a green haze. Actually a triple star system, the dot, when seen from Earth, is one of the claws in the constellation Scorpius, the Scorpion.