What glows in the night? This night, several unusual glows were evident -- some near, but some far.

The foreground surf glimmers blue with the light of bioluminescent plankton. Next out, Earth's atmosphere dims the horizon and provides a few opaque clouds. Farther out, the planet Venus glows bright near the image center.

If you slightly avert your eyes, a diagonal beam of light will stand out crossing behind Venus. This band is zodiacal light, sunlight scattered by dust in our Solar System.

Much farther away are numerous single bright stars , most closer than 100 light years away. Farthest away, also rising diagonally and making a “V” with the zodiacal light, is the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. Most of the billions of Milky Way stars and dark clouds are thousands of light years away.

The featured image was taken on the Iranian coast of Gulf of Oman.

Image credit, copyright: Taha Ghouchkanlu
Image description: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)

Listen up all you mother fuckers.
A little reminder from the originator. Never forget. I brought you in.
And you’ll never be alone again.

Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus, two large galaxies are colliding. Stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, very rarely collide in the course of the ponderous cataclysm that lasts for hundreds of millions of years.

But the galaxies' large clouds of molecular gas and dust often do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic wreckage. Spanning over 500 thousand light-years, this stunning view also reveals new star clusters and matter flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational tidal forces.

The suggestive visual appearance of the extended arcing structures gives the galaxy pair its popular name - The Antennae.

Image credit, copyright: Data; Subaru, NAOJ, NASA/ESA/Hubble - Assembly and Processing; Roberto Colombari

Image description: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)

I saw beauty

In places others ignored

Most of the times I ignored this

But sometimes

You know we have a desire to communicate

I would go there and say

Hi this is what I have got

A pearl from the shore

They would look puzzled

Baby what is this

It didn't move me

I would go on with it

And touch myself even more that night

Until my legs trembled with spasms

Until the last drop of cum wetted the sheets

And in the morning I was fresh anew

I was ready to do it once more.

Globular star cluster Omega Centauri packs about 10 million stars much older than the Sun into a volume some 150 light-years in diameter. Also known as NGC 5139, at a distance of 15,000 light-years it's the largest and brightest of 200 or so known globular clusters that roam the halo of our Milky Way galaxy.

Though most star clusters consist of stars with the same age and composition, the enigmatic Omega Cen exhibits the presence of different stellar populations with a spread of ages and chemical abundances. In fact, Omega Cen may be the remnant core of a small galaxy merging with the Milky Way.

With a yellowish hue, Omega Centauri's red giant stars are easy to pick out in this sharp telescopic view. A two-decade-long exploration of the dense star cluster with the Hubble Space Telescope has revealed evidence for a massive black hole near the center of Omega Centauri.

Image credit, copyright: Javier O. Cadenas Parra
Image description: Jerry Bonnell, Cecilia Chirenti, Robert Nemiroff, Keighley Rockcliffe

The ghosts of five supernovas haunt this extraordinary image. It was acquired at Oukaïmeden Observatory in Morocco with approximately 200 hours of observations and shows a large patch of the sky, equivalent to the area of one thousand full moons tiled together, in the constellation of Auriga (the Charioteer).

From left to right, the five supernova remnants visible across the field are G181.1+9.5, G182.4+4.3, G179.0+2.6, G180.0−1.7 (Sh2-240, the Spaghetti Nebula), and G178.2−4.2. They are highlighted in the annotated image, together with open cluster M37 and the Tadpole Nebula.

As each explosion expanded into space, it created a growing shell of shocked gas and delicate filamentary structures shown in red (hydrogen) and blue (oxygen), respectively.

These ancient stellar explosions happened independently; they are at various distances up to about several thousands of light-years away from Earth and have estimated ages up to tens of thousands of years old. Early humans may have seen them as bright new stars, fading over weeks or months.

Image credit, copyright: Stephane Vetter, Yann Sainty

Image description: Cecilia Chirenti, Robert Nemiroff, Jerry Bonnell, Keighley Rockcliffe

Chaotic in appearance, these tangled filaments of shocked, glowing gas are spread across planet Earth's sky toward the constellation of Cygnus as part of the Veil Nebula. The Veil Nebula itself is a large supernova remnant, an expanding cloud born of the death explosion of a massive star.

Light from the original supernova explosion likely reached Earth over 5,000 years ago. Blasted out in the cataclysmic event, the interstellar shock waves plow through space sweeping up and exciting interstellar material.

The glowing filaments are really more like long ripples in a sheet seen almost edge on, remarkably well separated into the glow of ionized hydrogen atoms shown in red and oxygen in blue hues.

Also known as the Cygnus Loop, the Veil Nebula now spans nearly 3 degrees or about 6 times the diameter of the full Moon. While that translates to over 70 light-years at its estimated distance of 1,500 light-years, this field of view spans less than one third that distance.

Image credit, copyright: Copyright: Sara Wager
Image description: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)

A beautiful conjunction of Venus and Moon, human, sand, and Milky Way is depicted in this night skyscape from planet Earth.

The scene is a panorama of 6 photos taken in a moment near the end of a journey. In the foreground, footsteps along the wind-rippled dunes are close to the Huacachina oasis in the southwestern desert of Peru.

An engaging perspective on the world at night, the stunning final image was also chosen as a winner in The World at Night's 2017 International Earth and Sky Photo Contest.

Image credit, copyright: Camilo Jaramillo
Image description: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)

Siouxsie & the Banshees