Astronomy Picture of the Day

Explanation: After parting with the Sun late last week, April's moon graced the early evening sky. Its slender, three-day-old crescent shares this lovely telescopic skyview with the nearby Pleiades star cluster. Here, the Moon's sunlit crescent is overexposed while the lunar terminator, or boundary between lunar night and day, is jagged with craters and mountains. Lunar surface features can also be seen in the dim lunar night illuminated by earthshine - light from sunlit planet Earth. The sister stars of the Pleiades are grouped at the right, but their alluring blue reflection nebulae, usually highlighted in telescopic images of the cluster, are washed-out in the much brighter moonlight.