This Month in Space: June

I've no qualms admitting that when one month ends and another begins I get downright childishly giddy with feverishness and anticipatory glee, knowing full well that another batch of sinewy and insanely-precise gorgeousness from space will be put together by a handful of websites, MSNBC's Science and Technology's oftentimes one of best and most comprehensive.

Clouds skitter above Papua New Guinea's Manam Volcano while thin white vaporous volcanic discharge issue forth from the mouth itself

Hot young stars--and not in a celebratory way. Here's a fecund star-forming region whose subzero, frosty glow is reflected and re-directed by the surrounding gas and clouds.

An aural pyrotechnic show put on display overtop the South Pole. Ethereal and tender.


And maybe I'm just a major sucker for chiaroscuro, but I adore this one, the light and dark composition. Fucking haunting and bare and solemnly moving.

Saturn's ice-composed, crater-hammered, and wisp- and dust-covered moon (and 15th largest moon in the entire Solar System) Dione shown in stark, almost unreal precision against the lazy, blurry backdrop of Titan, one of Saturn's other moons. And the void of space around it, that freezing void, in the center of which Dione is suspended like a levitating yogi.

There's plenty more where these came from, all of which are worth taking in on their own right. Check them out here.