2026-07-06
Dueling Bands over the Atacama Desert
The universe showed off again today — Dueling Bands over the Atacama Desert. Here is what NASA captured:
Why this matters
What you're looking at ties directly to deep-space objects, the planets, near-Earth objects. Every frame the world's observatories capture adds another data point to humanity's slowly-assembling map of everything beyond our planet.
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This connects to what you can track in real time on our 3D globe — explore Deep Space galaxy map · Solar System view · Asteroid tracker. Or open the live globe to watch flights, satellites, the ISS and spacecraft move right now.
The science — from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day
What are these two bands in the sky? The more commonly seen band is on the left and is the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. Our Sun orbits in the disk of this spiral galaxy so that from inside, it appears as a band of comparable brightness all the way around the sky. The less commonly seen band, on the right, is zodiacal light -- sunlight reflected from dust orbiting the Sun in our Solar System. Zodiacal light is brightest near the Sun and so is best seen just before sunrise or just after sunset. On some evenings, this ribbon of zodiacal light can appear quite prominent. It was discovered only in this century that zodiacal dust was mostly expelled by comets that have passed near Jupiter. The featured image was captured about a year ago from the Atacama Desert in Chile.
Image credit: Julien Looten · Source: NASA APOD
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