Tuesday, 24 March 2026

NASA Data Hackathon Inspires Community Action

On Jan. 31, students, library staff, researchers, and community members gathered at the University of Florida’s (UF) Marston Science Library for the Environmental Monitoring through Education, Research, and Geospatial Engagement (EMERGE) NASA Data Hackathon. This initiative empowers libraries, educators, and individuals to engage in public health and environmental science using real-world data tools and citizen science. At the center of EMERGE is NASA’s Global Learning & Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Observer app, which allows anyone with a smartphone to collect and explore data on mosquito habitats, land cover, clouds, and more.

From morning workshops to an end-of-day sprint, participants spent the day transforming real environmental data into maps, dashboards, infographics, and practical insights supporting public health and environmental decision-making. The event was hosted by the Geospatial Digital Informatics Lab (part of the Geography Department at UF), SciStarter (the world’s largest citizen science database), and Florida Community Innovation (a civic technology nonprofit), with support from NASA and UF Libraries.

The hackathon gave participants a chance to work directly with these volunteer-collected datasets and see how local observations connect to global research. Participants had access to a digital textbook created by the GeoDI Lab that explains how to download, process, visualize, and analyze GLOBE Observer data. At the hackathon, 13 teams came together to build projects analyzing GLOBE data or reenvisioning data collection for the app. You can explore the gallery of projects online here!

Celebrating Hackathon Winners

The following participants won honors in their categories.

APP IMPROVEMENT TRACK

Winner — Mosquito Tracker
Matheus Kunzler Maldaner
Hoang Anh Mai
Luana Kunzler Maldaner
Nicolas Murguia
Alfred Navarro

Honorable Mention — App Improvement Brief
Kelly Muma
Seth Paul

User Interface Recognition — GLOBE Observer, Simplified
Kaushal Thota
Sparsh Mogha

ADVANCED TRACK

Winner — Epidemiological Vector Mapping System
Aseel Ismail
Shreya Shanmugam
Devadarshini Dhandapani
Shivani Chandrasekar

Winner — GeoDude
Siddharth Nahar
Anushri N R
Avantika Holla
Matthew Losito

Honorable Mention — Mosquito Habitat Observations and Wildfire Hazard in Florida
Nancy Murphy
Philippa Burgess

Mapping Recognition — Mosquitos Worldwide Project
Ayesha Malligai M.

INTERMEDIATE TRACK

Winner — Swarm Sense
Isabella Bodea
Evan Mullins
Aashita Rai

Honorable Mention — Mosquito Risk Mapping
RamyaLakshmi KS
Delilah Penate
Thomas Barbato
Amit Rajpurkar

Data Analysis Recognition — Bias and Uncertainty in Reported Mosquito Habitat Data
Gabriel Dos Santos
Satyabrata Das
Matthew White
Dylan Aaron

BEGINNER TRACK

Winner — Beginner Track EMERGE Project
Breanna Blackwood
Demitri Tu
Masha Belyaeva
Elizabeth Nguyen
Tommy Lin

Honorable Mention — Mosquito Predicting with Globe Observer Data
Novaarcoid Rajpurkar

FIELD TRACK

Winner — Field Track Data Collection for Mosquito Habitat
Wei Liu
Yichan Li

How You Can Get Involved

If you’re interested in civic tech, public-interest data, and community-centered research, you’re invited to get involved with Florida Community Innovation (FCI), one of the Hackathon partners. The FCI works year-round with students and community partners to build accessible tools, maps, and public resources and welcomes new collaborators from a wide range of backgrounds. Get started with FCI by visiting floridainnovation.org, and email info@floridainnovation.org to join one of their Wednesday meetings at 6 p.m. EDT to be matched with a project (like building games for Miami-Dade’s Recyclepedia app, helping create an AI tool for social workers in Orlando, and more).

Interested in shaping future EMERGE events? Apply to join a planning committee to help design the next hackathon! Committee members will help think through formats, tracks, accessibility, and community partnerships, with the goal of keeping future events welcoming, practical, and responsive to local needs. Organizers will receive a small honorarium. For more information, send an email to Caroline Nickerson: caroline.nickerson@floridainnovation.org

To start doing NASA science from your own neighborhood or backyard, you can also download the GLOBE Observer app! This app makes it possible for anyone to collect and explore data on mosquito habitats, land cover, and more!

The EMERGE program is made possible with the support of NASA through the Citizen Science Seed Funding Program, with the goal of enabling more scientists to develop and use citizen science techniques in their work.

From left: Olivia Zhang, Joe Aufmuth, Natya Hans, Yichan Li, Wei Liu, and Caroline Nickerson.

Caroline Nickerson

https://geoemerge.com/nasa-at-uf

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GLOBE Observer

Choose from several different projects to help scientists learn about planet Earth. For anyone with a smartphone. Kid friendly!

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Mar 23, 2026

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Science Through Shadows: How Astronomical Alignments Reveal the Universe

6 min read

Science Through Shadows: How Astronomical Alignments Reveal the Universe

When one celestial object passes in front of another, it can cast a shadow that travels across space – and sometimes across Earth. These moments of alignment, known as eclipses, occultations, and transits, allow scientists to study distant objects in remarkable ways. By observing how light changes when an object briefly blocks another, astronomers can measure sizes and shapes, detect atmospheres, and refine the orbits of asteroids and planets.

3 panel image showing the moment of totality during the total solar eclipse in 2024, a computer generated rocky asteroid occulting a distant star, and a the dark disk of a planet transiting across a yellow star

From left to right: Image of the total solar eclipse of 2024, an asteroid occulting a distant star, and an exoplanet transiting a star.

The Science Through Shadows project, funded by NASA’s Science Activation program and led by Fiske Planetarium at the University of Colorado Boulder, explores how these shadow-based events help scientists conduct astronomical research. The project has produced a series of short films that explain the science behind eclipses, occultations, and solar observations while highlighting the people who help make these discoveries possible – including students, educators, and volunteer citizen scientists.

The videos are designed for use in classrooms, libraries, planetariums, and informal learning environments, and are available free of charge in both English and Spanish. Versions are available in 2D formats for streaming and classroom use, as well as fulldome formats for planetariums worldwide.

Explore the seven films currently available:

Ring of Fire Eclipse

Focus: The annular solar eclipse of October 14, 2023
On October 14, 2023, observers across North America experienced an annular solar eclipse, sometimes called a “ring of fire.” During an annular eclipse, the Moon passes directly in front of the Sun but appears slightly smaller in the sky, leaving a bright ring of sunlight visible around its edges.

This video explains how annular eclipses differ from total solar eclipses, explores the science behind these events, and highlights safe viewing practices. It also helps viewers understand what makes eclipse observations both scientifically valuable and deeply memorable experiences.

Total Eclipse of the Sun

Focus: The total solar eclipse of April 8, 2024
A total solar eclipse is one of the most dramatic astronomical events visible from Earth. On April 8, 2024, millions of people across North America had the opportunity to witness the Moon completely block the Sun, revealing the Sun’s faint outer atmosphere, known as the corona.

This video explores what happens during a total solar eclipse, why traveling to the path of totality offers a dramatically different experience, and how scientists use eclipses to study the Sun’s atmosphere.

What Causes Eclipses?

Focus: The science behind eclipses

Why don’t eclipses happen every month? What conditions must occur for the Sun, Earth, and Moon to align?

This episode explains the orbital mechanics that produce eclipses and clarifies the differences between solar and lunar eclipses. By addressing common misconceptions, it helps viewers understand the celestial alignments that create these spectacular events.

Chasing Polymele’s Shadow

Focus: The Lucy occultation campaign

When an asteroid passes in front of a distant star, it briefly blocks the star’s light, casting a shadow across Earth. Astronomers call this event an occultation, and it can reveal valuable information about the asteroid’s size, shape, and surrounding environment.

This video follows the Lucy Occultation Project, where scientists and citizen scientists worked together to observe the Trojan asteroid Polymele ahead of NASA’s Lucy mission flyby. On February 3, 2023, more than 100 telescopes across two continents were deployed to capture the moment Polymele passed in front of a star. The resulting observations help scientists better understand the asteroid before the spacecraft’s encounter.

Humanity Touches the Sun

Focus: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is helping scientists explore the Sun closer than ever before. On December 24, 2024, the spacecraft made its closest approach to the Sun, traveling more than 430,000 miles per hour – faster than any human-made object.

This video explores how Parker Solar Probe studies the Sun’s outer atmosphere and helps scientists investigate long-standing questions about the solar corona and solar wind.

The Sun Touches Humanity

Focus: NASA’s PUNCH mission

NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission provides a new way to observe how the Sun influences space throughout the inner solar system.

Consisting of four suitcase-sized satellites in low-Earth orbit, PUNCH creates global, three-dimensional observations of the region between the Sun and Earth. These measurements help scientists better understand how the solar wind forms and evolves, and how solar storms travel through space.

Eclipse Participatory Science

Focus: Citizen science during recent solar eclipses

Solar eclipses create powerful opportunities for collaborative scientific research. This episode follows two large participatory science projects that took place during recent North American eclipses: the Nationwide Eclipse Ballooning Project, another NASA Science Activation-funded project that’s led by Montana State University, and Citizen CATE 2024, a NASA- and National Science Foundation-supported observing campaign.

Through balloon launches, telescope observations, and hands-on engineering challenges, students, educators, and volunteers collected atmospheric and solar data that scientists are now analyzing. The episode highlights how people with curiosity and passion can contribute meaningfully to real scientific discovery.

2D versions of these videos in both English and Spanish can be found on Fiske Planetarium’s YouTube channel, and downloadable versions are available through the project’s distribution page. Fulldome masters (1K, 2K, and 4K) are also available for free download via the Fiske Productions page, allowing planetariums around the world to share these stories of discovery with their audiences.

Through projects like Science Through Shadows, NASA’s Science Activation program helps connect everyone, everywhere with NASA Science content, experts, and opportunities to participate. Whether observing an eclipse, tracking an asteroid’s shadow, or studying data from a spacecraft, these moments of alignment offer powerful opportunities to explore how the universe works – and how people everywhere can participate in the process of discovery.

NASA Citizen Science

Everyone, everywhere – regardless of country of origin or citizenship status – can collaborate with professional scientists, conduct cutting-edge science, and make real discoveries as a volunteer for NASA Citizen Science projects. These projects give participants the opportunity to collaborate with professional scientists, conduct cutting-edge science, and make real discoveries related to NASA’s five research divisions: Earth science, planetary science, astrophysics, biological and physical sciences, and heliophysics. Explore available projects and get started: https://science.nasa.gov/citizen-science/

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Mar 23, 2026

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SWOT Mission Unlocks a New View of Our Waterways

1 min read

SWOT Mission Unlocks a New View of Our Waterways

Explore how rivers move, change, and sustain life across the planet.

Using data from the SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) mission, jointly developed by the NASA/JPL and the Centre National d’Études Spatiales with contributions from the Canadian Space Agency and the United Kingdom Space Agency, scientists can now measure rivers continuously and across the entire globe for the first time in human history.

From the Mississippi River to the Amazon, these observations reveal how rivers flow, how they change over time, and how they support ecosystems, economies, and communities worldwide like never before.

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Mar 23, 2026

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Monday, 23 March 2026

NASA’s Hubble Revisits Crab Nebula to Track 25 Years of Expansion

4 Min Read

NASA’s Hubble Revisits Crab Nebula to Track 25 Years of Expansion

Colorful nebula in space with a white haze throughout that is more concentrated in the center with a rippling effect. Colorful gas filaments appear to splash outward from the nebula center, colored yellow, magenta, and blue. A faint black border with right angles at the corners of the images show where the telescope’s field of view stopsdotted line with right angles shows the borders of the telescope’s image. Small white stars dot the background.

This 2024 image that NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured of the Crab Nebula, paired with its past observations and those of other telescopes, allows astronomers to study how the supernova remnant is expanding and evolving over time.

Credits:
Image: NASA, ESA, STScI, William Blair (JHU); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

A quarter-century after its first observations of the full Crab Nebula, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken a fresh look at the supernova remnant. The result is an unparalleled, detailed look at the aftermath of a supernova and how it has evolved over Hubble’s long lifetime. A paper detailing the new Hubble observation is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

This new Hubble observation continues a legacy that stretches back nearly 1,000 years, when astronomers in 1054 recorded the supernova as an impressively bright new star that, for weeks, was visible even during the day. The Crab Nebula is the aftermath of SN 1054, located 6,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.

“We tend to think of the sky as being unchanging, immutable,” said astronomer William Blair of Johns Hopkins University, who led the new observations. “However, with the longevity of the Hubble Space Telescope, even an object like the Crab Nebula is revealed to be in motion, still expanding from the explosion nearly a millennium ago.”

The supernova remnant was discovered in the mid-18th century, and in the 1950s Edwin Hubble was among several astronomers who noted the close correlation between Chinese astronomical records of a supernova and the position of the Crab Nebula. The discovery that the heart of the Crab contained a pulsar — a rapidly rotating neutron star — that was powering the nebula’s expansion finally aligned modern observations and ancient records.

In its new image, Hubble captured the nebula’s intricate filamentary structure, as well as the considerable outward movement of those filaments over 25 years, at a pace of 3.4 million miles per hour. Hubble is the only telescope with the combination of longevity and resolution capable of capturing these detailed changes.

For better comparison with the new image, Hubble’s 1999 image of the Crab was re-processed. The variation of colors in both of the Hubble images shows a combination of changes in local temperature and density of the gas as well as its chemical composition.

Image: NASA, ESA, STScI, William Blair (JHU); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

“Even though I’ve worked with Hubble quite a bit, I was still struck by the amount of detailed structure we can see and the increased resolution with the Wide Field Camera 3, as compared to 25 years ago,” Blair said. Wide Field Camera 3 was installed in 2009, the last time Hubble instruments were updated by astronauts.

Blair noted that filaments around the periphery of the nebula appear to have moved more compared to those in the center, and that rather than stretching out over time, they appear to have simply moved outward. This is due to the nature of the Crab as a pulsar wind nebula powered by synchrotron radiation, which is created by the interaction between the pulsar’s magnetic field and the nebula’s material. In other well-known supernova remnants, the expansion is instead driven by shockwaves from the initial explosion, eroding surrounding shells of gas that the dying star previously cast off.

The new, higher-resolution Hubble observations are also providing additional insights into the 3D structure of the Crab Nebula, which can be difficult to determine from a 2D image, Blair said. Shadows of some of the filaments can be seen cast onto the haze of synchrotron radiation in the nebula’s interior. Counterintuitively, some of the brighter filaments in the latest Hubble images show no shadows, indicating they must be located on the far side of the nebula.

According to Blair, the real value of Hubble’s Crab Nebula observations is still to come. The Hubble data can be paired with recent data from other telescopes that are observing the Crab in different wavelengths of light. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope released its infrared-light observations of the Crab Nebula in 2024. Comparison of the Hubble image with other contemporary multiwavelength observations will help scientists put together a more complete picture of the supernova’s continuing aftermath, centuries after astronomers first wondered at a new little star twinkling in the sky.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for more than three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, also supports mission operations at NASA Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.

2024

1999

Image: NASA, ESA, STScI, William Blair (JHU); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

A colorful nebula of thick filaments of cosmic dust and gas appears to splash outward from a hazy white center. Colors include bright pink, blue, and orange. Small white stars dot the background.

This newly processed image of the Crab Nebula comes from data originally captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1999 and 2000.

Image: NASA, ESA, STScI, William Blair (JHU); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

This newly processed image of the Crab Nebula comes from data originally captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1999 and 2000.

Image: NASA, ESA, STScI, William Blair (JHU); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

2024

1999

2024 and 1999

Tracking 25 Years of Expansion

2024 and 1999

Sliding or toggling between these two Hubble images, captured 25 years apart, reveals changes in the position of the nebula’s filaments relative to more distant background stars. Energy from the rapidly spinning pulsar at the nebula’s core is driving the filaments outward. Some differences between the images likely relate to the change in instruments on Hubble. The 1999 image was taken with Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 instrument, which NASA astronauts replaced with the Wide Field Camera 3 in 2009 during Hubble’s last servicing mission. Each instrument took several shots to create a mosaic image of the full nebula. Wide Field Camera 3 has a slightly greater range of detection, both in surface area and filters for imaging.

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Hubble image of the Crab Nebula (2024)

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Hubble image of the Crab Nebula (1999)

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Related Images & Videos

Crab Nebula (2024)

Crab Nebula (1999)

This newly processed image of the Crab Nebula comes from data originally captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 1999 and 2000.

Hubble Space Telescope image of the Crab nebula, annotated with additional information. At the bottom right are compass arrows indicating the orientation of the image on the sky. The north arrow points in the 12 ou2019clock direction. The east arrow points toward 9 ou2019clock. At the lower left is one scale bar labeled 4 light-years and 2 arcminutes. The length of the scale bar is about one third the total width of the image. At the upper left is label text reading Crab Nebula M1, HST WFC3/UVIS - 2024. Below this is the color key, with filter names appearing in the color assigned to them in the image. F502N is blue, F547M is cyan, F631N is green, and F673N is red.

Crab Nebula (2024 Compass Image)

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope 2024 image of the Crab Nebula, with compass arrows, scale bar, and color key for reference.

Crab Nebula (1999 Compass Image)

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope 1999 image of the Crab Nebula, with compass arrows, scale bar, and color key for reference.

Crab Nebula Expansion over 25 Years

The Crab Nebula is a dynamic supernova remnant that has been expanding and evolving for nearly one thousand years. Often nebulas and other objects in space appear frozen in a single telescope snapshot, providing stunning detail but no sense of change over time. However, thanks to…

Tour the Crab Nebula

This video highlights details in NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope images of the Crab Nebula. Hubble’s first observation of the full nebula began in 1999, and 25 years later it captured a new portrait. Hubble’s longevity and powerful instruments provide astronomers …

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Last Updated

Mar 23, 2026

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Andrea Gianopoulos

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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

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Media

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

Leah Ramsay, Christine Pulliam
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, Maryland

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Tuesday, 24 March 2026

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Monday, 23 March 2026

NASA’s Hubble Revisits Crab Nebula to Track 25 Years of Expansion

Tracking 25 Years of Expansion

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Crab Nebula (2024)

Crab Nebula (1999)

Crab Nebula (2024 Compass Image)

Crab Nebula (1999 Compass Image)

Crab Nebula Expansion over 25 Years

Tour the Crab Nebula

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The Death Throes of Stars