Hubble's Hidden Treasures — Image Processing
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Muchas, muchas gracias por sus visitas, favs y comentarios :)
Many, many thanks for your visits, favs and comments :)
Olympus & 60 mm macro.
A beautiful galactic dance 211 million light years away. Captured by Hubble WFC3 and processed by me.
A macro of a glass of coffee, for Macro Monday, on the theme of beverage.
This was my second try at it, as the first try gave me some very lukewarm image. Also had to take a photo, then leave it for a few seconds, then go back, as the lense kept fogging up!
I was originally going to leave this as colour, but popped it into silver efex after color efex, just to see and I really liked it.
Nikon Z6, 18mm Extension Tube, FTZ, Tamron 90mm Macro Lense, Ring FLash,
Exposure X5, Color Efex Pro 4, Silver Efex Pro 2
La galaxie spirale NGC 634 (Hubble) est située à 217 millions d'années-lumière de la Terre dans la constellation du Triangle (Triangulum). La finesse des détails et la structure spirale exceptionnellement parfaite de la galaxie en ont fait une cible d'observation privilégiée suite à la disparition violente d'une naine blanche. La supernova de type Ia SN2008a y avait ainsi été repérée et brièvement rivalisé d'éclat avec la galaxie hôte.
Les naines blanches constituent le point final de l'évolution des étoiles dont la masse se situe entre 0,07 et 8 masses solaires, soit 97 % des étoiles de la Voie lactée. Avec toutefois des exceptions, dans un système binaire une naine blanche peut accréter la matière provenant de son étoile compagnon et prendre progressivement du poids. Mais l'étoile peut finir par devenir trop pleine, lorsqu'elle dépasse 1,38 masse solaire. Des réactions nucléaires se déclenchent en produisant d'énormes quantités d'énergie et l'étoile explose en supernova de type Ia.
Cette image a été créée à partir d'images prises avec le canal grand champ de la caméra avancée de Hubble. Ces images ont été obtenues à travers un filtre jaune (F555W, coloré en bleu), combinées avec celles images obtenues à travers des filtres rouge (F625W, coloré en vert) et proche infrarouge (F775W, coloré en rouge). Les temps d'exposition totaux par filtre étaient respectivement de 3 750 s, 3 530 s et 2 484 s, et le champ de vision de 2,5 x 1,5 minute d'arc, soir 0,062° (cf. ESA/Hubble et NASA).
Pour situer la galaxie spirale NGC 634 (Hubble) dans la constellation du Triangle (Triangulum) :
Hubble rocks out with heavy metal stars!
This 10.5-billion-year-old globular cluster, NGC 6496, is home to heavy-metal stars of a celestial kind! The stars comprising this spectacular spherical cluster are enriched with much higher proportions of metals — elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are curiously known as metals in astronomy — than stars found in similar clusters.
A handful of these high-metallicity stars are also variable stars, meaning that their brightness fluctuates over time. NGC 6496 hosts a selection of long-period variables — giant pulsating stars whose brightness can take up to, and even over, a thousand days to change — and short-period eclipsing binaries, which dim when eclipsed by a stellar companion.
The nature of the variability of these stars can reveal important information about their mass, radius, luminosity, temperature, composition, and evolution, providing astronomers with measurements that would be difficult or even impossible to obtain through other methods.
NGC 6496 was discovered in 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop. The cluster resides at about 35,000 light-years away in the southern constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion).
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
Text credit: European Space Agency
Read more: go.nasa.gov/1U2wqGW
… no not the space telescope, the (T)Oil and Trouble one.
Another quick on for Sliders Sunday. I am working on a couple of sets as project, but neither is near enough to completion to share, and time is limited for me just now.
Never one to throw away images (though I am trying to learn how) I have repurposed one of my oil droplet images from Smile on Saturday’s project yesterday. The starting image had lots of detail and texture and a little bit of colour variation from using two oils (see the comment from yesterday for more if you wish).
The work was done mainly in Affinity though I did us a bit of Nik Color Efex to tweak it a bit at the end.
The basic approach takes an oft-travelled path for me. Duplicate the image layer, flip it horizontally and vertically to give the overall result some symmetry and blend the two layers together with Difference blend mode (or any other mode that works for you) which injects lots of colours. The rest is just tweaking the colours.
I’ll post a link to the in-camera image so you can see the rather bland (in comparison) starting point.
Thanks for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Sliders Sunday :)
The Hubble Space telescope's observations of the universe have seldom produced more intriguing images than that seen in this section of bubble glass in the window of a public house.
Lors du lancement du télescope spatial Hubble il y a 35 ans, personne n'aurait pu imaginer à quel point il allait transformer notre vision de l'espace. Lancé le 24 avril 1990, le télescope poursuit aujourd'hui sa mission. Pour célébrer son anniversaire, la NASA a publié quatre images récentes prises par Hubble, qui prouvent sa pérennité, même après trois décennies !
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When the launched 35 years ago, no one would have guessed how much it would shape the way we view space. Launched on April 24, 1990, the telescope continues its mission today. To celebrate its anniversary, NASA released four recent images taken by Hubble that prove its staying power even after three decades !
Credit : NASA, ESA, STScI; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
We are back from Portugal, a little jet-lagged (always milder going east to west than vice-versa) and none the worse for the wear. Time to upload the 1,136 images that I took. Here's a garden abstract from the archives while I get to it. :)
- Rosa's Garden of Earthly Delights, Keefer Lake, Ontario, Canada -
Dans la constellation du Poisson Volant (Volans) à 300 millions d'a.l. de la Terre, l'anneau de Lindsay-Shapley AM 0644-741 est une galaxie lenticulaire non barrée et en anneau. Elle avait autrefois un noyau jaunâtre qui était le centre d’une galaxie spirale normale. Il se serait formé par une collision avec une autre galaxie, ce qui a déclenché un effet gravitationnel et une perturbation provoquant la condensation de la poussière, ce qui l'a forcé à s'étendre et à créer un anneau. D'une taille de 150 000 a.l., il possède aujourd'hui une région de formation d'étoiles dominée par de jeunes étoiles massives, bleues et chaudes. Les régions roses le long de l'anneau sont des nuages raréfiés d'hydrogène gazeux rougeoyant et fluorescent, alors qu'il est bombardé par une forte lumière ultraviolette émise par les étoiles bleues. Il continuera à s’étendre pendant encore 300 millions d’années, après quoi il commencera à se désintégrer.
Outre les deux grandes structures galactiques proches, plusieurs galaxies très éloignées sont visibles sur l'image, principalement dans sa partie inférieure gauche. Les deux stries rougeâtres et les autres petites structures elliptiques témoignent que leur lumière a été émise bien avant celle des galaxies voisines et qu'elles sont donc bien plus éloignées de nous dans l’espace-temps (cf. site Hubble).
Pour situer l'astre dans sa constellation :
www.flickr.com/photos/7208148@N02/48950795956/in/datepost...
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope feels incredibly three-dimensional for a piece of deep-space imagery. The image shows Arp 282, an interacting galaxy pair composed of the Seyfert galaxy NGC 169 (bottom) and the galaxy IC 1559 (top). Interestingly, both galaxies have monumentally energetic cores known as active galactic nuclei (AGN), although that is difficult to tell from this image, which is fortunate. If the image revealed the full emission of both AGNs, their brilliance would obscure the beautifully detailed tidal interactions we see in this image. Tidal forces occur when an object’s gravity causes another object to distort or stretch. The direction of tidal forces is away from the lower-mass object and toward the higher mass object. When two galaxies tidally interact, gas, dust, and even entire star systems can move toward one galaxy and away from the other. The image reveals this process in action as delicate streams of matter visibly link the two galaxies.
Astronomers now accept that an important aspect of how galaxies evolve is the way they interact with one another. Galaxies can merge, collide, or brush past one another – each interaction significantly affecting their shapes and structures. As common as such interactions may be, it is rare to capture an image of two galaxies interacting in such a visibly dynamic way.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Dalcanton, Dark Energy Survey, Department of Energy (DOE), Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory/NoirLab/National Science Foundation/Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS); Acknowledgment: J. Schmidt
For more information: www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-views-a-co...
A black hole forms in a giant cumulus cloud where nothing can escape, well not actually nothing but it’s toil and trouble for somebody, that ship on the horizon for instance.
A 130 millions d'a.l., les bras gracieux et sinueux de la majestueuse galaxie spirale NGC 3147, d'un diamètre de 83 000 a.l., apparaissent comme un grand escalier en spirale balayant l’espace dans cette image du télescope spatial Hubble. Ce sont en fait de longues bandes de jeunes étoiles bleues, de nébuleuses roses et de poussière. La beauté de la galaxie dément le fait qu’en son centre même se trouve un trou noir mal nourri, entouré d’un disque mince et compact d’étoiles, de gaz et de poussière qui ont été pris dans un maelstrom gravitationnel. La gravité du trou noir est si intense que tout ce qui s’aventure près de lui est balayé dans le disque. Ce dernier est si profondément ancré dans le champ gravitationnel intense du trou noir que la lumière du disque de gaz est modifiée, selon les théories de relativité d’Einstein, donnant aux astronomes un aperçu unique des processus dynamiques proches (cf. hubblesite.org).
Pour mieux situer l'astre dans sa constellation :
www.flickr.com/photos/7208148@N02/48686608841/in/datepost...
After seeing yesterday's APOD, a Hubble Legacy Archive image processed by Hunter Wilson; (apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160309.html) I really enjoyed the presentation, but there were a few things that I didn't like about the way the image was processed. So naturally I decided to have a go at it myself and downloaded the data from the website last night (hla.stsci.edu/) and started tinkering with it this morning. I finished it to an initial satisfactory processing and was quite pleased at the results!
This shining disk of a spiral galaxy sits approximately 25 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Sculptor. Named NGC 24, the galaxy was discovered by British astronomer William Herschel in 1785, and measures some 40,000 light-years across.
This picture was taken using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, known as ACS for short. It shows NGC 24 in detail, highlighting the blue bursts (young stars), dark lanes (cosmic dust), and red bubbles (hydrogen gas) of material peppered throughout the galaxy’s spiral arms. Numerous distant galaxies can also been seen hovering around NGC 24’s perimeter.
However, there may be more to this picture than first meets the eye. Astronomers suspect that spiral galaxies like NGC 24 and the Milky Way are surrounded by, and contained within, extended haloes of dark matter. Dark matter is a mysterious substance that cannot be seen; instead, it reveals itself via its gravitational interactions with surrounding material. Its existence was originally proposed to explain why the outer parts of galaxies, including our own, rotate unexpectedly fast, but it is thought to also play an essential role in a galaxy’s formation and evolution. Most of NGC 24’s mass — a whopping 80 percent — is thought to be held within such a dark halo.
Cette photomosaïque de la galaxie d'Andromède, située à 2,5 millions d'années-lumière de la Terre, est la plus grande jamais créée à partir d'images du télescope spatial Hubble. Elle comprend plus de 600 images du télescope et a nécessité plus d'une décennie de travail. La photomosaïque comprend 200 millions d'étoiles, soit une fraction de la population d'étoiles estimée à mille milliards d'étoiles d'Andromède.
« Les régions intéressantes comprennent : (a) des amas d'étoiles bleues brillantes intégrées dans la galaxie, des galaxies d'arrière-plan vues beaucoup plus loin et un bombardement photographique par quelques étoiles brillantes au premier plan qui sont en fait à l'intérieur de notre Voie lactée ; (b) NGC 206, le nuage d'étoiles le plus visible d'Andromède ; (c) un jeune amas d'étoiles bleues nouveau-nées ; (d) la galaxie satellite M32, qui pourrait être le noyau résiduel d'une galaxie qui est entrée en collision avec Andromède ; (e) des bandes de poussière sombres à travers une myriade d'étoiles.
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This photomosaic of the Andromeda galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years from Earth, is the largest ever created using images from the Hubble Space Telescope. It features over 600 Hubble images and required over a decade to make. The composite features 200 million stars, a fraction of Andromeda’s estimated trillion-star population.
Interesting regions include: (a) Clusters of bright blue stars embedded within the galaxy, background galaxies seen much farther away, and photo-bombing by a couple bright foreground stars that are actually inside our Milky Way; (b) NGC 206 the most conspicuous star cloud in Andromeda; (c) A young cluster of blue newborn stars; (d) The satellite galaxy M32, that may be the residual core of a galaxy that once collided with Andromeda; (e) Dark dust lanes across myriad stars.
Crédit : NASA, ESA, Benjamin F. Williams (Université de Washington), Zhuo Chen (Université de Washington), L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern) ; traitement des images : Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
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Clustered at the center of this image are six brilliant spots of light, four of them creating a circle around a central pair. Appearances can be deceiving, however, as this formation is not composed of six individual galaxies, but is actually two separate galaxies and one distant quasar imaged four times. Data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope also indicates that there is a seventh spot of light in the very center, which is a rare fifth image of the distant quasar. This rare phenomenon is the result of the two central galaxies, which are in the foreground, acting as a lens.
The four bright points around the galaxy pair, and the fainter one in the very center, are in fact five separate images of a single quasar (known as 2M1310-1714), an extremely luminous but distant object. The reason we see this quintuple effect is a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when a celestial object with an enormous amount of mass – such as a pair of galaxies – causes the fabric of space to warp. When light from a distant object travels through that gravitationally warped space, it is magnified and bent around the huge mass. This allows humans here on Earth to observe multiple, magnified images of the far-away source. The quasar in this image actually lies farther away from Earth than the pair of galaxies. The galaxy pair’s enormous mass bent and magnified the light from the distant quasar, giving the incredible appearance that the galaxies are surrounded by four quasars – when in reality, a single quasar lies far beyond them!
Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) imaged the trio in spectacular detail. It was installed on Hubble in 2009 during Hubble Servicing Mission 4, Hubble’s final servicing mission. WFC3 continues to provide both top-quality data and fantastic images 12 years after its installation.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, T. Treu; Acknowledgment: J. Schmidt
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.
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Spanning from 2003 to 2021, this collection of images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features galaxies that are all hosts to both Cepheid variables and supernovae. These two celestial phenomena are both crucial tools used by astronomers to determine astronomical distance, and have been used to refine our measurement of Hubble’s constant, the expansion rate of the Universe.
Credits: NASA, ESA CC BY 4.0
Spotted in Explore by DMC43. Thanks Donna! #228 23/11/08
Pretty chilly here today so back to indoor flowers for the moment!
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows two of the galaxies in the galactic triplet Arp 248 — also known as Wild's Triplet — which lies around 200 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The two large spiral galaxies visible in this image — which flank a smaller, unrelated background spiral galaxy — seem to be connected by a luminous bridge. This elongated stream of stars and interstellar dust is known as a tidal tail, and it was formed by the mutual gravitational attraction of the two foreground galaxies.
This observation comes from a project which delves into two rogues’ galleries of weird and wonderful galaxies: A Catalogue Of Southern Peculiar Galaxies And Associations, compiled by astronomers Halton Arp and Barry Madore, and the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, compiled by Halton Arp. Each collection contains a menagerie of spectacularly peculiar galaxies, including interacting galaxies such as Arp 248, as well as one- or three-armed spiral galaxies, galaxies with shell-like structures, and a variety of other space oddities.
Hubble used its Advanced Camera for Surveys to scour this menagerie of eccentric galaxies in search of promising candidates for future observations with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, and Hubble itself. With such a wealth of astronomical objects to study in the night sky, projects such as this, which guide future observations, are a valuable investment of observing time. As well as the scientific merits of observing these weird and wonderful galaxies, they were also — very unusually — selected as Hubble targets because of their visual appeal to the general public!
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, J. Dalcanton; CC BY 4.0
[Image description: Two spiral galaxies are viewed almost face-on; they are a mix of pale blue and yellow in colour, crossed by strands of dark red dust. They lie in the upper-left and lower-right corners. A long, faint streak of pale blue joins them, extending from an arm of one galaxy and crossing the field diagonally. A small spiral galaxy, orange in colour, is visible edge-on, left of the lower galaxy.]
La nébuleuse planétaire NGC 2899 est située à 4 500 années-lumière de la Terre et à 25 895 années-lumière du centre galactique dans la constellation australe des Voiles (Vela). Cet objet présente un flux de gaz cylindrique, bipolaire et diagonal propulsé par le rayonnement et les vents stellaires d'une naine blanche située en son centre. En réalité, deux étoiles compagnes pourraient interagir et sculpter la nébuleuse, pincée en son centre par un anneau fragmenté (tore) qui ressemble à un beignet à moitié mangé. Elle présente une forêt de "piliers" gazeux pointant vers la source du rayonnement et des vents stellaires. Ses couleurs proviennent de l'hydrogène et de l'oxygène brillants (cf. NASA, ESA, STScI ; Image Processing : Joseph DePasquale STScI).
Pour situer la nébuleuse planétaire NGC 2899 (Hubble) dans la constellation australe des Voiles (Vela) :
Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered an immense cloud of hydrogen dubbed “The Behemoth” bleeding from a planet orbiting a nearby star. The enormous, comet-like feature is about 50 times the size of the parent star. The hydrogen is evaporating from a warm, Neptune-sized planet, due to extreme radiation from the star.
This phenomenon has never been seen around an exoplanet so small. It may offer clues to how other planets with hydrogen-enveloped atmospheres could have their outer layers evaporated by their parent star, leaving behind solid, rocky cores. Hot, rocky planets such as these that roughly the size of Earth are known as Hot-Super Earths.
“This cloud is very spectacular, though the evaporation rate does not threaten the planet right now,” explains the study’s leader, David Ehrenreich of the Observatory of the University of Geneva in Switzerland. “But we know that in the past, the star, which is a faint red dwarf, was more active. This means that the planet evaporated faster during its first billion years of existence because of the strong radiation from the young star. Overall, we estimate that it may have lost up to 10 percent of its atmosphere over the past several billion years.”
Read more: www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/hubble-sees-a-behemoth-bleed...
Caption: This artist's concept shows "The Behemoth," an enormous comet-like cloud of hydrogen bleeding off of a warm, Neptune-sized planet just 30 light-years from Earth. Also depicted is the parent star, which is a faint red dwarf named GJ 436. The hydrogen is evaporating from the planet due to extreme radiation from the star. A phenomenon this large has never before been seen around any exoplanet.
Credits: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.
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The galaxy merger Arp-Madore 417-391 steals the spotlight in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The Arp-Madore catalogue is a collection of particularly peculiar galaxies spread throughout the southern sky, and includes a collection of subtly interacting galaxies as well as more spectacular colliding galaxies. Arp-Madore 417-391, which lies around 670 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus in the southern celestial hemisphere, is one such galactic collision. The two galaxies have been distorted by gravity and twisted into a colossal ring, leaving the cores of the two galaxies nestled side by side.
Hubble used its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to capture this scene — the instrument is optimised to hunt for galaxies and galaxy clusters in the ancient Universe. Hubble’s ACS has been contributing to scientific discovery for 20 years, and throughout its lifetime it has been involved in everything from mapping the distribution of dark matter to studying the evolution of galaxy clusters.
This image comes from a selection of Hubble observations designed to create a list of intriguing targets for follow-up observations with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, as well as other ground-based telescopes. Astronomers chose a list of previously unobserved galaxies for Hubble to inspect between other scheduled observations. Over time, this lets astronomers build up a menagerie of interesting galaxies while using Hubble’s limited observing time as fully as possible.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, J. Dalcanton; CC BY 4.0
This shot from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a maelstrom of glowing gas and dark dust within one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).
This stormy scene shows a stellar nursery known as N159, an HII region over 150 light-years across. N159 contains many hot young stars. These stars are emitting intense ultraviolet light, which causes nearby hydrogen gas to glow, and torrential stellar winds, which are carving out ridges, arcs, and filaments from the surrounding material.
At the heart of this cosmic cloud lies the Papillon Nebula, a butterfly-shaped region of nebulosity. This small, dense object is classified as a High-Excitation Blob, and is thought to be tightly linked to the early stages of massive star formation.
N159 is located over 160,000 light-years away. It resides just south of the Tarantula Nebula (heic1402), another massive star-forming complex within the LMC. This image comes from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. The region was previously imaged by Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, which also resolved the Papillon Nebula for the first time.
This is an image of the Cartwheel Galaxy taken with the NASA/ESA (European Space Agency) Hubble Space Telescope.
The object was first spotted on wide-field images from the U.K. Schmidt telescope and then studied in detail using the Anglo-Australian Telescope.
Lying about 500 million light-years away in the constellation of Sculptor, the cartwheel shape of this galaxy is the result of a violent galactic collision. A smaller galaxy has passed right through a large disk galaxy and produced shock waves that swept up gas and dust — much like the ripples produced when a stone is dropped into a lake — and sparked regions of intense star formation (appearing blue). The outermost ring of the galaxy, which is 1.5 times the size of our Milky Way, marks the shock wave’s leading edge. This object is one of the most dramatic examples of the small class of ring galaxies.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
NASA is celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope's 30 years of unlocking the beauty and mystery of space by unveiling a stunning new portrait of a firestorm of starbirth in a neighboring galaxy.
In this Hubble portrait, the giant red nebula (NGC 2014) and its smaller blue neighbor (NGC 2020) are part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located 163,000 light-years away. The image is nicknamed the "Cosmic Reef," because it resembles an undersea world.
Thirty years ago, on April 24, 1990, Hubble was carried aloft from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard the space shuttle Discovery, along with a five-astronaut crew. Deployed into Earth orbit a day later, the telescope opened a new eye onto the cosmos that has been transformative for our civilization.
Hubble is revolutionizing modern astronomy, not only for scientists, but also by taking the public on a wondrous journey of exploration and discovery. Hubble's never-ending, breathtaking celestial snapshots provide a visual shorthand for Hubble's top scientific achievements. Unlike any space telescope before it, Hubble made astronomy relevant, engaging and accessible for people of all ages. The space telescope's iconic imagery has redefined our view of the universe and our place in time and space.
"Hubble has given us stunning insights about the universe, from nearby planets to the farthest galaxies we have seen so far," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. "It was revolutionary to launch such a large telescope 30 years ago, and this astronomy powerhouse is still delivering revolutionary science today. Its spectacular images have captured the imagination for decades, and will continue to inspire humanity for years to come."
Unencumbered by Earth's blurring atmosphere, the space observatory unveils the universe in unprecedented crystal-clear sharpness across a broad range of wavelengths, from ultraviolet to near-infrared light.
Hubble's top accomplishments include measuring the expansion and acceleration rate of the universe; finding that black holes are common among galaxies; characterizing the atmospheres of planets around other stars; monitoring weather changes on planets across our solar system; and looking back in time across 97% of the universe to chronicle the birth and evolution of stars and galaxies.
Hubble has yielded to date 1.4 million observations and provided data that astronomers around the world have used to write more than 17,000 peer-reviewed scientific publications, making it the most prolific space observatory in history. Its archival data alone will fuel future astronomy research for generations to come.
Hubble's longevity can be attributed to five space shuttle servicing missions, from 1993 to 2009, in which astronauts upgraded the telescope with advanced instruments, new electronics and on-orbit repairs. The venerable observatory, with its suite of cameras and other instruments, is expected to stay operational through the 2020s, in synergy with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.
For more information: www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/hubble-marks-30-years-i...
Credits: NASA, ESA and STScI
Discovered in 1784 by the German–British astronomer William Herschel, NGC 4394 is a barred spiral galaxy situated about 55 million light-years from Earth. The galaxy lies in the constellation of Coma Berenices (Berenice's Hair) and is considered to be a member of the Virgo Cluster.
NGC 4394 is the archetypal barred spiral galaxy, with bright spiral arms emerging from the ends of a bar that cuts through the galaxy’s central bulge. These arms are peppered with young blue stars, dark filaments of cosmic dust, and bright, fuzzy regions of active star formation. At the center of NGC 4394 lies a region of ionized gas known as a low-ionization nuclear emission-line region (LINER). LINERs are active regions that display a characteristic set of emission lines in their spectra— mostly from weakly ionized atoms of oxygen, nitrogen and sulphur.
Although LINER galaxies are relatively common, it’s still unclear where the energy comes from to ionize the gas. In most cases it is thought to be the influence of a black hole at the center of the galaxy, but it could also be the result of a high level of star formation. In the case of NGC 4394, it is likely that gravitational interaction with a nearby neighbor has caused gas to flow into the galaxy’s central region, providing a new reservoir of material to fuel the black hole or to make new stars.
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These official NASA photographs are being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photographs. The photographs may not be used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement by NASA. All Images used must be credited. For information on usage rights, click here.
I have recently published an article on narrowband imaging, and creating Hubble Palette astrophotography images.
This post should be useful for those looking to get into this type of imaging - as it took me quite a while to get up to speed on the subject myself!
astrobackyard.com/narrowband-imaging/
Here is Melotte 15 inside of the Heart Nebula in SHO (SII, Ha, OIII)
The Prawn Nebula is located in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way, in the constellation Scorpius. Other names include both IC 4628, and Gum 56. From our vantage point, it is about 6,000 light-years away. IC 4628 is an extensive stellar nursery containing a large number of very hot, luminous, young stars created from the surrounding gases.
The nebula is about 250 light-years in diameter, with an apparent size of 1.5 degrees. For reference, this would cover an area three to four times the size of the moon. With my instrument, the full moon will fill my sensor. Unfortunately, I can’t fit the entire complex within this image.
Gum 56 is very faint and emits light at wavelengths not visible to our eyes. Two luminous giants and several young stars in this nebula emit an incredible amount of ultraviolet radiation ionising the hydrogen gas. The result, it glows. Within this invisibility, many things are concealed. Material ejected from violent supernova in the past provides new materials that allow for the formation of new stars. The cycle of stellar life and death continues as dust and gases collapse down, forming new stars.
The photo presented is a narrowband image created by combining filtered light from SII, Ha, and OIII filters. It allows us to reveal details of objects that we cannot see easily, or not at all. Often, the results can be very striking and dramatic. I tried to retain that pleasing gradient of yellow golds, through bands of teal, and hues of blue found in a traditional Hubble Palette image. I was pleased with the star colours ranging from blue to red, using only the narrowband filters. These colours appear very different from a traditional true colour image constructed with red, green, blue filtered light.
Instruments:
• 10 Inch RCOS fl 9.1
• Astro Physics AP-900 Mount
• SBIG STL 11000m
• FLI Filter Wheel
• Baader Planetarium H-alpha 7nm Narrowband-Filter
• Baader Planetarium OIII 8.5nm Narrowband-Filter
• Baader Planetarium SII 8.0nm Narrowband-Filter
Exposure Details:
• SII 22 X 1800
• Ha 22 X 1800
• OIII 24 X 1800
Total Exposure Time: 34.0 Hours
ABELL 2151
3zObservatory deep field
Con il socio Giorgio Mazzacurati abbiamo deciso di omaggiare i 30 anni dell'Hubble space telescope scimmiottando una delle più belle foto che ha fatto il telescopio spaziale.
L'Ammasso di Ercole (Abell 2151) è un ammasso di galassie situato nell'omonima costellazione alla distanza di oltre un miliardo di anni luce dalla Terra.
È inserito nel Catalogo Abell redatto nel 1958 ed ha una classe di ricchezza 2, in quanto formato da 129 galassie. È un ammasso di tipo III secondo la classificazione di Bautz-Morgan in quanto contiene anche numerose galassie spirali. Inoltre sono presenti diverse galassie interagenti. (fonte wiki)
Composizione LRGB circa 6h ore di integrazione a bin2
Strumentazione:
RC12GSO su EQ8
CCD G24000-Astrodon Filter LRGB - OA Starlight
Elaborazione tramite Pixinsight/Photoshop
Autori: Paolo Zampolini e Giorgio Mazzacurati @3zObservatory
The jellyfish galaxy JW39 hangs serenely in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy lies over 900 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices, and is one of several jellyfish galaxies that Hubble has been studying over the past two years.
Despite this jellyfish galaxy’s serene appearance, it is adrift in a ferociously hostile environment; a galaxy cluster. Compared to their more isolated counterparts, the galaxies in galaxy clusters are often distorted by the gravitational pull of larger neighbours, which can twist galaxies into a variety of weird and wonderful shapes. If that was not enough, the space between galaxies in a cluster is also pervaded with a searingly hot plasma known as the intracluster medium. While this plasma is extremely tenuous, galaxies moving through it experience it almost like swimmers fighting against a current, and this interaction can strip galaxies of their star-forming gas.
This interaction between the intracluster medium and the galaxies is called ram-pressure stripping, and is the process responsible for the trailing tendrils of this jellyfish galaxy. As JW39 has moved through the cluster the pressure of the intracluster medium has stripped away gas and dust into long trailing ribbons of star formation that now stretch away from the disc of the galaxy.
Astronomers using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 studied these trailing tendrils in detail, as they are a particularly extreme environment for star formation. Surprisingly, they found that star formation in the ‘tentacles’ of jellyfish galaxies was not noticeably different from star formation in the galaxy disc.
[Image Description: A spiral galaxy. It is large in the centre with a lot of detail visible. The core glows brightly and is surrounded by concentric rings of dark and light dust. The spiral arms are thick and puffy with grey dust and glowing blue areas of star formation. They wrap around the galaxy to form a ring. Part of the arm is drawn out into a dark thread above the galaxy, and dust from the arm trails off to the right.]
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Gullieuszik and the GASP team CC BY 4.0
Située dans la constellation de la Chevelure de Bérénice (Coma Berenices), dans l'amas de Coma, la galaxie spirale NGC 4921 se situe à 310 millions d'a.l. de la Terre. Elle possède un noyau lumineux, une barre centrale brillante, un anneau proéminent de poussière noire et des amas bleus d’étoiles récemment formées. Plusieurs galaxies plus petites l'accompagnent, des galaxies non apparentées, tout comme dans la Voie lactée (cf. site Hubble).
Pour situer l'astre dans sa constellation :
www.flickr.com/photos/7208148@N02/48775942151/in/datepost...
NGC 1672 is a barred spiral galaxy located in the constellation Dorado and is 60 million light-years away from earth.
This Data was taken from the Hubble Legacy Archive and processed by me.
Programms used for processing: Pixinsight, Darktable, GIMP
Based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and obtained from the Hubble Legacy Archive, which is a collaboration between the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI/NASA), the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF/ESA) and the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC/NRC/CSA).
The galaxy UGCA 193, seen here by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is a galaxy in the constellation of Sextans (the Sextant). Looking rather like a waterfall, UGCA 193 appears to host many young stars, especially in the lower portion of this view, creating a striking blue haze and the sense that the stars are falling from “above.”
The blue color of UGCA 193 indicates the stars that we see are hot — some more than six times hotter than our Sun. We know that cooler stars appear to our eyes as redder, and hotter stars appear bluer. A star’s surface temperature and color are also linked to its mass, with heavier stars “burning” at higher temperatures, resulting in a blue glow from their surfaces.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Tully; Acknowledgment: Gagandeep Anand
#NASA #MarshallSpaceFlightCenter #MSFC #Marshall #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #astronomy #space #astrophysics #solarsystemandbeyond #gsfc #Goddard #GoddardSpaceFlightCenter #ESA #EuropeanSpaceAgency #galaxy
The sharp eye of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured the tiny moon Phobos during its orbital trek around Mars on 12 May 2016. The observations were intended to photograph Mars while it was on its closest approach to Earth along its orbit, so the moon’s cameo appearance was a bonus.
Over the course of 22 minutes, Hubble took 13 separate exposures, allowing astronomers to create a timelapse video showing the movement of Phobos around its host planet. Because the moon is so small, just 27×22×18 km, it appears star-like in the images.
It also orbits incredibly close to Mars, just 6000 km above the planet, making it closer to its parent planet than any other moon in the Solar System.
Sibling Deimos orbits much further out, at a distance of some 23 500 km.
While the origin of the moons is much debated, their fate is inevitable. Phobos is gradually spiraling in towards Mars and within 50 million years will likely either break up due to the planet’s gravity, or crash into its surface. Meanwhile, the opposite is true for Deimos: its orbit is slowly taking it away from Mars.
This image was first published on 20 July 2017.
Credit: NASA, ESA and Z. Levay (STScI) Acknowledgment: J. Bell (ASU) and M. Wolff (Space Science Institute)