Enjoy Space : Image of the day

A hole in space
This was how the team working with the Herschel infrared space telescope named this picture of a star formation area. In actual fact, the European observatory detected a small black area in this bright nebula (near to the centre of the photograph). Astronomers think that one of the gestating suns has “pierced” the gas clouds with the force of the powerful jets that it gives off during its birth.
Credit: ESA/HOPS Consortium

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Soyuz in Guiana

This is the mythical rocket par excellence, the one that launched Sputnik, the first satellite and Gagarin, the first man in space. The CSG, Guiana Space Centre, is now one of its launch bases: a historic achievement.
Star Trek and NASA

The first episode of this famous science-fiction series was broadcast in September 1966. NASA has often made references to these programmes, as in the case of the space shuttle Enterprise, which had the same name as the spaceship in the series.
Alan Shepard, from suborbital to the Moon

50 years ago on 5 May 1961, a few weeks after Gagarin, American Alan Shepard reached space. Several years later, he was to walk on the Moon, summarising as it were the race in which the Soviet Union and the United States were competing.