Citizen Science Highlights

NASA needs your help! You can collaborate with professional scientists, conduct cutting-edge science, and make real discoveries. A science degree is not required, just a passion for understanding the natural world. Here, you can read news about NASA-funded citizen science projects, new discoveries, and opportunities to get involved. For more information on current citizen science projects.

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Four young latinx students wearing solar viewing glasses and and looking up at the sun, grasping each other in a circle as if they're jumping up and down with excitement.

NASA@ My Library and Partners Engage Millions in Eclipse Training and Preparation

2 min read

The Space Science Institute, with funding from the NASA Science Mission Directorate and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, provided unprecedented training, support, and supplies to 15,000 libraries in the U.S. and territories in support of public engagement during the 2023…

Article1 day ago

An Eclipse Megamovie Megastar

1 min read

Nazmus “Naz” Nasir is a software engineer by day, and an astrophotographer by night….and sometimes by day as well! This April, Naz participated in NASA’s Eclipse Megamovie 2024 project, photographing the total solar eclipse. He posted online a spectacular video composed of stabilized and…

Article1 day ago
The bright-white, diffuse glow of an elliptical galaxy sits at image center. The galaxy's core appears as an intense-white circle that gets more diffuse as you move outward from the core. A rusty-red, diffuse cloud is visible to the upper-left of the galaxy. It extends to the upper-left corner of the image, where it is very faint. Black background dotted with foreground stars and distant galaxies.

Hubble Examines an Active Galaxy Near the Lion’s Heart

2 min read

It might appear featureless and unexciting at first glance, but NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations of this elliptical galaxy — known as Messier 105 — show that the stars near the galaxy’s center are moving very rapidly. Astronomers have concluded…

Article1 day ago
In the background, the bottom half of the image is filled with a portion of Earth. The top half is the very dark blue of space. Separating the two are bands of glowing greens and red, depicting the upper layers of Earth's atmosphere. In the foreground, a satellite. The satellite has two rectangular wing-like structures jutting out from the right and left of a silver rectangular box. On the top are 3 large white dishes.

Alphabet Soup: NASA’s GOLD Finds Surprising C, X Shapes in Atmosphere

5 min read

Who knew Earth’s upper atmosphere was like alphabet soup? NASA’s Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission has revealed unexpected C- and X-shaped formations in an electrified layer of gas high above our heads called the ionosphere. While…

Article2 days ago
Mosaic of the Pillars of Creation visualization model, composed of 4 rectangular strips oriented 45 degrees clockwise from vertical. Strips alternate between Hubble and Webb views of the visualization model, with each strip labeled: “Hubble” at lower right corners of first and third strips; “Webb” at upper left corners of the second and fourth strips. Webb strips have drop shadows that make it look like they are overlaid on top of larger Hubble image. Mosaic shows 3 vertical structures (pillars) of thick smoke-like material. Pillar edges are glowing, with thin wisps of material moving away into space. In Hubble strips, pillars are dark brown and opaque, on greenish blue background. In Webb strips, pillars are bright orange to brown with a distinct area of bright red at the top of middle pillar. A red star appears at the tip of a peak in the left pillar and the background is deep blue.

Pillars of Creation Star in New Visualization from NASA’s Hubble and Webb Telescopes

6 min read

Made famous in 1995 by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the Pillars of Creation in the heart of the Eagle Nebula have captured imaginations worldwide with their arresting, ethereal beauty. Now, NASA has released a new 3D visualization of these towering…

Article3 days ago

NASA Webb, Hubble Scientist Marcia Rieke Awarded Gruber Cosmology Prize

3 min read

Marcia Rieke, a scientist who worked on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope, has received the Gruber Foundation’s 2024 Cosmology Prize. Rieke will receive the award and gold laureate pin at a ceremony August 8, 2024, at…

Article5 days ago
Four students and their teacher smiling, holding their research poster titled "Does Car Idling in rural New Jersey affect air quality?" The students have medals.

Teachers Bring Student Teams to GLOBE Research Symposia

5 min read

A year-long professional development experience for teachers resulted in participation of 10 student teams at Global Learning & Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) student research symposia. Teachers from the ENGAGE (Earth, NASA, GLOBE, and Guided Explorations) GLOBE Mission Earth…

Article1 week ago
Clouds of gas and dust with many stars. The clouds form a flat, blue background toward the bottom, and become thicker and smokier toward the top. Stars on one side light the nebula. A thick arc of gas and dust reaches around from the bottom-right corner of the image toward the top-left corner. It begins as a dark and obscuring cloud at bottom right and gradually becomes brightly lit by many stars at the upper left. Other large, foreground stars lie between the nebula and the viewer.

Hubble Captures Infant Stars Transforming a Nebula

2 min read

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image presents a visually striking collection of interstellar gas and dust. Named RCW 7, the nebula is located just over 5,300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Puppis. Nebulae are areas rich in the raw…

Article1 week ago
A rectangular image with black vertical rectangles at the bottle left and top right to indicate missing data. A young star-forming region is filled with wispy orange, red, and blue layers of gas and dust. The upper left corner of the image is filled with mostly orange dust, and within that orange dust, there are several small red plumes of gas that extend from the top left to the bottom right, at the same angle. The center of the image is filled with mostly blue gas. At the center, there is one particularly bright star, that has an hourglass shadow above and below it. To the right of that is what looks a vertical eye-shaped crevice with a bright star at the center. The gas to the right of the crevice is a darker orange. Small points of light are sprinkled across the field, brightest sources in the field have extensive eight-pointed diffraction spikes that are characteristic of the Webb Telescope.

First of Its Kind Detection Made in Striking New Webb Image

6 min read

Alignment of bipolar jets confirms star formation theories For the first time, a phenomenon astronomers have long hoped to directly image has been captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). In this stunning image of the Serpens…

Article1 week ago
A galaxy against a black backdrop dotted with more distant galaxies and a few foreground stars. The galaxy is slightly tilted toward us, providing a good view of dark dust lanes from slightly above. They are backlit by the galaxy’s core. This dust appears rusty-brown. The core itself glows brightly in a yellowish light as brilliant-blue regions sparkle through the dust. Several background galaxies also are visible, including an edge-on spiral just to the left of NGC 1546.

NASA Releases Hubble Image Taken in New Pointing Mode

2 min read

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken its first new images since changing to an alternate operating mode that uses one gyro. The spacecraft returned to science operations June 14 after being offline for several weeks due to an issue with…

Article2 weeks ago
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James Webb Space Telescope

The image is divided horizontally by an undulating line between a cloudscape forming a nebula along the bottom portion and a comparatively clear upper portion. Speckled across both portions is a starfield, showing innumerable stars of many sizes. The smallest of these are small, distant, and faint points of light. The largest of these appear larger, closer, brighter, and more fully resolved with 8-point diffraction spikes. The upper portion of the image is blueish, and has wispy translucent cloud-like streaks rising from the nebula below. The orangish cloudy formation in the bottom half varies in density and ranges from translucent to opaque. The stars vary in color, the majority of which have a blue or orange hue. The cloud-like structure of the nebula contains ridges, peaks, and valleys – an appearance very similar to a mountain range. Three long diffraction spikes from the top right edge of the image suggest the presence of a large star just out of view.

Perseverance Rover

Parker Solar Probe

Juno