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) :
It's Dog Day Monday again! I can't believe another week has flown bye.
Meet Hubble. All I know is that he was not named after the space station or Edwin Hubble after whom the space station was named. Hubble was a loveable, happy-go-lucky Welsh Corgi that lived right around the corner from us until he and his owners moved out of the Bay Area in 2014. Every time I'd meet him, he'd "smile." Don't get the idea that every dog I'm going to show you is smiling. I'm getting into the more serious group and then, just plain old. And, you know, we get grumpy as dogs, especially the two who I'll be showing you in a few weeks that were 17 when I met them.
Anyway, Happy Dog Day Monday #19. Any day with a dog is a happy one (a gross exaggeration, but not as exaggerated as any day without a dog isn't half as great as a day with one). When you unravel that, go rescue a dog.
Cats are okay, too, but from what I've seen on You Tube (and at my nephew's home), they are usually cantankerous, shredding rugs and couches, and love to throw things off countertops. So do parrots, but at least a parrot will talk to you while you're trying to correct them. Our cockatiel used to sing all the radio commercials he'd learned from the radio while we went to school. That was 61 years ago. My favorite, "Where there's Life, there's Lucky Strikes!"
… 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 :)
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
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)
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.
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 -
The Veil Nebula is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus. It constitutes the visible portions of the Cygnus Loop (radio source W78, or Sharpless 103), a large but relatively faint supernova remnant. The source supernova exploded circa 3,000 BC to 6,000 BC, and the remnants have since expanded to cover an area roughly 3 degrees in diameter (about 6 times the diameter, or 36 times the area, of the full moon). The distance to the nebula is not precisely known, but Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) data supports a distance of about 1,470 light-years.
The Hubble Space Telescope captured several images of the nebula. The analysis of the emissions from the nebula indicate the presence of oxygen, sulfur, and hydrogen. This is also one of the largest, brightest features in the x-ray sky.
The Eastern Veil (also known as Caldwell 33), whose brightest area is NGC 6992, trailing off farther south into NGC 6995 (together with NGC 6992 also known as "Network Nebula") and IC 1340. Above the west end of NGC6992 is showcase.
Taken at Sugar Grove Nature Center, McLean, IL on 7/8/2017
Image type: Narrowband HA-OIII (RB) 8x600ea The green channel was synthetized.
Hardware: AT8RC, SBIG ST8300M
Software: Nebulosity, CCDStack, Photoshop CS6
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...
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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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!
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) :
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
What's happening to this spiral galaxy? Just a few hundred million years ago, NGC 2936, the upper of the two large galaxies shown, was likely a normal spiral galaxy -- spinning, creating stars -- and minding its own business. But then it got too close to the massive elliptical galaxy NGC 2937 below and took a dive. Dubbed the Porpoise Galaxy for its iconic shape, NGC 2936 is not only being deflected but also being distorted by the close gravitational interaction. A burst of young blue stars forms the nose of the porpoise toward the right of the upper galaxy, while the center of the spiral appears as an eye. Alternatively, the galaxy pair, together known as Arp 142, look to some like a penguin protecting an egg. Either way, intricate dark dust lanes and bright blue star streams trail the troubled galaxy to the lower right. The featured re-processed image showing Arp 142 in unprecedented detail was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope last year. Arp 142 lies about 300 million light years away toward the constellation, coincidently, of the Water Snake (Hydra). In a billion years or so the two galaxies will likely merge into one larger galaxy.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble, HLA
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.]
The scattered stars of the globular cluster NGC 6355 are strewn across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. NGC 6355 is a galactic globular cluster that resides in our Milky Way galaxy's inner regions. It is less than 50,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus.
Globular clusters are stable, tightly bound groups of tens of thousands to millions of stars that are associated with all types of galaxies. Their dense populations of stars and mutual gravitational attraction give these clusters a roughly spherical shape that holds a bright, central concentration of stars surrounded by an increasingly sparse sprinkling of stars. The dense, bright core of NGC 6355 shines in crystal-clear detail as Hubble is able to resolve individual stars in the crowded area toward the center of this image.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, E. Noyola, R. Cohen
#NASA #NASAMarshall #NASAGoddard #ESA #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #astrophysics
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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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
Target: NGC1499 The California Nebula in the Hubble pallet
The California Nebula is an emission nebula located in the constellation Perseus. Its name comes from its resemblance to the outline of the US State of California (in this composition on it's side). It is almost 2.5° long on the sky compared with the the moon at 1/2°. It lies at a distance of about 1,000 light years from Earth. While evaluating individual images that were stacked, I found I had captured a 200km diameter asteroid 13 Egeria. It's located to the left and down from the brightest star, above and between the close by 2 bright
Gear:
• Mount: ZWO AM5
• Main Cam: ZWO ASI294MM Pro @ gain 120 and -10C
• Guide Cam: ZWO ASI120MM Mini with Askar OAG
• Telescope: Askar 103APO w/.8x reducer - 560mm f/5.4
• Filter: Antlia EDGE Antlia SHO 4.5nm
Acquisition:
• 4 Panel Mosaic
• Roughly 4.5 hours integration each panel
• Sessions: 29, 30, and 31-Dec-2024
• Moon: n/a
• Location: Houston Backyard ~ Bortle 8/9
• Location: Austin Backyard ~ Bortle 8/9
Pixinsight Processing - SHO MOSAIC
• Assemble Panels
• Image Solver
• Mosaic by Coordinates
• Trim Mosaic Tile
• Photometric Mosaic (average)
• Crop, Auto ABE, Image Solver
• BXT, SXT
• Stars Only
• NB to RGB Stars Combination script with star stretch
• Starless
• Revert image back to having stars
• Stretch using HT_Stretch_Unlinked pixel math script
• LRGB Combination into SHO pallet
• Invert, SCNR to fix magenta stars
• Narrowband Normalization SHO
• NXT
• HT to set black point, Curves for color balance, Saturation
Photoshop Processing
• Starless
• Levels color balancing
• ACR highlights, black point, clarity, color mixer, noise reduction
• Stars
• Curves, Dust and Scratches to reduce stars
• Watermark
This intriguing observation from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a gravitationally lensed galaxy with the long-winded identification SGAS J143845+145407. Gravitational lensing has resulted in a mirror image of the galaxy near the center of this image, creating a captivating centerpiece. A third distorted image of the galaxy appears as a bridge between them.
Gravitational lensing occurs when the mass of an enormous celestial body – such as a galaxy cluster – curves spacetime and causes the path of light from distant objects to visibly bend around it, as if by a lens. Appropriately, the body causing the light to curve is called a gravitational lens, and the distorted background object is referred to as being "lensed.” Gravitational lensing can result in multiple images of the original galaxy, as seen in this image, or in the background object appearing as a distorted arc or even a ring. Another important consequence of this lensing distortion is magnification, allowing astronomers to observe objects that would otherwise be too far away or be too faint to see.
Hubble has a special flair for detecting lensed galaxies. The telescope's sensitivity and crystal-clear vision let it see faint and distant gravitational lenses that ground-based telescopes cannot detect because of the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere. Hubble was the first telescope to resolve details within lensed images of galaxies and is capable of imaging both their shape and internal structure.
This particular lensed galaxy is from a set of Hubble observations that take advantage of gravitational lensing to peer inside galaxies in the early universe. The lensing reveals details that allow astronomers to better understand star formation in early galaxies, which gives scientists insight into how the overall evolution of galaxies unfolded.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Rigby
#NASA #MarshallSpaceFlightCenter #MSFC #Marshall #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #astrophysics #NASAGoddard #gsfc #Gravitationallensing #galaxy
This Hubble image shows the central region of a spiral galaxy known as NGC 247. NGC 247 is a relatively small spiral galaxy in the southern constellation of Cetus (The Whale). Lying at a distance of around 11 million light-years from us, it forms part of the Sculptor Group, a loose collection of galaxies that also contains the more famous NGC 253 (otherwise known as the Sculptor Galaxy).
NGC 247’s nucleus is visible here as a bright, whitish patch, surrounded by a mixture of stars, gas and dust. The dust forms dark patches and filaments that are silhouetted against the background of stars, while the gas has formed into bright knots known as H II regions, mostly scattered throughout the galaxy’s arms and outer areas.
This galaxy displays one particularly unusual and mysterious feature — it is not visible in this image, but can be seen clearly in wider views of the galaxy, such as a picture from ESO’s MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope. The northern part of NGC 247’s disc hosts an apparent void, a gap in the usual swarm of stars and H II regions that spans almost a third of the galaxy’s total length.
There are stars within this void, but they are quite different from those around it. They are significantly older, and as a result much fainter and redder. This indicates that the star formation taking place across most of the galaxy’s disk has somehow been arrested in the void region, and has not taken place for around one billion years. Although astronomers are still unsure how the void formed, recent studies suggest it might have been caused by gravitational interactions with part of another galaxy.
Image Credit: NASA/ESA
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
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).
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 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...
Telescopio o obiettivo di acquisizione: TS Optics APO102 triplet fpl53
Camera di acquisizione: Moravian G2-8300FW
Montatura: iOptron iEQ45-pro
Telescopio o obiettivio di guida: Orion Short Tube 80/400
Camera di guida: QHYCCD Q5L-II-M
Riduttore di focale: TS Optics 0,79x Reducer 4-element
Software: Pleiades Astrophoto S.L. PixInsight V1.8
Risoluzione: 3276x2436
Date: 27 luglio 2017
Pose:
Baader Ha 36mm 7nm: 18x600" -15C bin 1x1
Baader O3 36mm 8.5nm: 18x600" -15C bin 1x1
Baader S2 36 mm 8 nm: 18x600" -15C bin 1x1
Integrazione: 9.0 ore
Dark: ~13
Flat: ~15
Bias: ~31
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the asteroid Dimorphos was taken on 19 December 2022, nearly four months after the asteroid was impacted by NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission. Hubble’s sensitivity reveals a few dozen boulders knocked off the asteroid by the force of the collision. These are among the faintest objects Hubble has ever photographed inside the Solar System. The ejected boulders range in size from 1 m to 6.7 m across, based on Hubble photometry. They are drifting away from the asteroid at around 1 km per hour. The discovery yields invaluable insights into the behaviour of a small asteroid when it is hit by a projectile for the purpose of altering its trajectory.
[Image Description: The bright white object at lower left is the asteroid Dimorphos. It has a blue dust tail extending diagonally to the upper right. A cluster of blue dots surrounds the asteroid. These are boulders that were knocked off the asteroid when, on 26 September 2022, NASA deliberately slammed the half-tonne DART impactor spacecraft into the asteroid as a test of what it would take to deflect some future asteroid from hitting Earth. Hubble photographed the slow-moving boulders in December 2022.]
Credits: NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA); CC BY 4.0
'Tis the season for holiday decorating and tree-trimming. Not to be left out, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have photographed a festive-looking nearby planetary nebula called NGC 5189. The intricate structure of this bright gaseous nebula resembles a glass-blown holiday ornament with a glowing ribbon entwined.
Planetary nebulae represent the final brief stage in the life of a medium-sized star like our sun. While consuming the last of the fuel in its core, the dying star expels a large portion of its outer envelope. This material then becomes heated by the radiation from the stellar remnant and radiates, producing glowing clouds of gas that can show complex structures, as the ejection of mass from the star is uneven in both time and direction. To read more go to: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/ngc5189.html
Credit: 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 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)