PSR B1509-58
A pulsar wind nebula seen from Chandra the x-ray observatory. This is an old favorite, often called The Hand of God for its appearance as a big human hand. In reality, however, it's just a kind of crazy nebula shaped by whatever insanity this neutron star is inflicting upon its surroundings.
Even after summing up all of the cumulative data from various observations over the years, the image still has a rather low S/N ratio. It seemed visually harsh, but at the same time, I often prefer the noise over heavy smoothing. This time I overlaid my smoothing group to 60% opacity over the unsmoothed image, which leaves a good hint at the S/N ratio while calming down the coarseness in texture a bit.
Anyway, it's a fascinating object, and I wish there were more nearby pulsars out there for us to look at, but I'm glad there aren't any too close.
More information and various other resources are available at the Chandra website, for anyone who may be interested.
Data from the following ten Observation IDs were used to create this image: 754, 3833, 3834, 4384, 5534, 5535, 5562, 6116, 6117, 9138
Red: .30-.95 keV
Green: .95-2.87 keV
Blue: 2.87-7.00 keV
North is up.
PSR B1509-58
A pulsar wind nebula seen from Chandra the x-ray observatory. This is an old favorite, often called The Hand of God for its appearance as a big human hand. In reality, however, it's just a kind of crazy nebula shaped by whatever insanity this neutron star is inflicting upon its surroundings.
Even after summing up all of the cumulative data from various observations over the years, the image still has a rather low S/N ratio. It seemed visually harsh, but at the same time, I often prefer the noise over heavy smoothing. This time I overlaid my smoothing group to 60% opacity over the unsmoothed image, which leaves a good hint at the S/N ratio while calming down the coarseness in texture a bit.
Anyway, it's a fascinating object, and I wish there were more nearby pulsars out there for us to look at, but I'm glad there aren't any too close.
More information and various other resources are available at the Chandra website, for anyone who may be interested.
Data from the following ten Observation IDs were used to create this image: 754, 3833, 3834, 4384, 5534, 5535, 5562, 6116, 6117, 9138
Red: .30-.95 keV
Green: .95-2.87 keV
Blue: 2.87-7.00 keV
North is up.