View allAll Photos Tagged LargeMagellanicCloud
One of my favourite shots from Namibia is of this quiver tree taken at Canyon Lodge, a wonderful place to stay near the Fish River Canyon.
A quiver tree is a type of aloe that is really only found in southern Namibia and the Cape province in South Africa. In this shot, it is lit up by the parking lights of our car which was parked about 100m away. The sky was incredibly dark and the Milky Way looked amazing that night.
If you look closely enough, you can see a little meteorite travelling through the Large Magellanic Cloud to the right of the quiver tree. I only noticed it when I was processing the photo some time later.
The Tarantula nebula known as 30 Doradus and part of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Photographed using Telescope live. Stacked with Photoshop and coloured with siril software
The center of the Milky Way begins to rise behind the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) on this first day of Spring. To the right, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds (SMC and LMC), two dwarf galaxies 200,000 and 160,000 light years away, respectively. South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO), Sutherland, South Africa, 20 Mar 2010.
© 2010 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
Description: This composite image contains X-ray data from Chandra (green and blue) that show heated material in the center of a shell generated by a supernova explosion. Optical data from Hubble show the glowing pink rim, which is ambient gas being shocked by the blast wave from the supernova, as well as the surrounding star field. The Type Ia supernova that resulted in the creation of this remnant would have been visible from Earth some 400 years ago.
Creator/Photographer: Chandra X-ray Observatory
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999, is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory built to date. The mirrors on Chandra are the largest, most precisely shaped and aligned, and smoothest mirrors ever constructed. Chandra is helping scientists better understand the hot, turbulent regions of space and answer fundamental questions about origin, evolution, and destiny of the Universe. The images Chandra makes are twenty-five times sharper than the best previous X-ray telescope. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Medium: Chandra telescope x-ray
Date: 2010
Persistent URL: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2010/snr0509/
Repository: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Gift line: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.Hughes et al, Optical: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Accession number: snr0509_469
The Milky Way seen from the bottom of the Gibson Steps, on the southern coast of Victoria in Australia. There is zero light pollution and the Milky Way and dark dusty nebula like the Coalsack are clearly visible to the naked eye but the wonders of a modern digital camera and a little post-processing bring out details that the human eye can't see. Deus ex machina.
The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), 160,000 light years away, is in the top right of the shot and just below it is the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), all of 200,000 light years away.
Out at a favourite dark sky spot, both of the Magellanic Clouds were stunning. At the end of an imaging session, I couldn't help but fire off some frames to capture them.
The supernova explosion that created this object was first observed on Earth in February 1987. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory sees X-rays produced by debris from the explosion. X-rays from Chandra (purple); optical and infrared from the Hubble Space Telescope (red, green, blue); infrared from the James Webb Space Telescope (red, green, and blue)
At the center of this composite image is a small object resembling a glowing pink Cheerio. This is supernova SN 1987A, named after the year the core-collapse explosion was first observed on Earth. It is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small nearby galaxy. The pink Cheerio, or equatorial ring, represents material ejected tens of thousands of years before the supernova explosion. The blast wave from the supernova is striking the ring, causing it to produce X-rays detected by Chandra. Inside this ring is a pale, steel blue dot containing debris from the star that exploded.. The ring sits at the center of a ghostly figure 8, outlined in brick orange. This entire structure is surrounded by a packed field of stars, specks and dots in white, blue, and orange. A long, brick orange cloud hovers near the left edge of the image.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical/Infrared: NASA/ESA/STScI; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Major
#NASAMarshall #NASA #astrophysics #NASAChandra #NASA #galaxy #supernova #LargeMagellanicCloud
So much to see in the southern night skies. Here's another night shot from Terrigal, New South Wales.
The Carina Nebula is the bright fuzzy patch at the top centre, above the Southern Cross in the dead centre of the shot. At the bottom are the two really bright stars Alpha Centauri and Rigil Kentaurus, pointing towards the cross.
At the extreme top right of the shot is the wonderful Large Magellanic Cloud.
Nikon D7000 + Sigma ART 50mm stopped at f/4.
20 x 180s subs
Imaged from Hacienda Los Andes, Chile in April 2016.
Hubble Space Telescope’s iconic images and scientific breakthroughs have redefined our view of the Universe. To commemorate three decades of scientific discoveries, this image is one of the most photogenic examples of the many turbulent stellar nurseries the telescope has observed during its 30-year lifetime. The portrait features the giant nebula NGC 2014 and its neighbour NGC 2020 which together form part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, approximately 163 000 light-years away. The image is nicknamed the “Cosmic Reef” because it resembles an undersea world.
Learn more about this image here and take a look at region from a ground-based telescope here.
Credits: NASA, ESA, and STScI; CC BY 4.0
This Chandra X-ray Observatory image from 2008 shows the debris of a massive star explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy about 160,000 light years from Earth. The supernova remnant (SNR) shown here, N132D, is the brightest in the Magellanic clouds, and belongs to a rare class of oxygen-rich remnants. Most of the oxygen that we breathe on Earth is thought to have come from explosions similar to this one.
The colors in this image show low energy X-rays (red), intermediate energy X-rays (green) and high energy X-rays (blue). Substantial amounts of oxygen are detected in this image, particularly in the green regions near the center of the image. The location of these oxygen-rich areas, detected in the Chandra image, is generally well matched with the oxygen-rich areas detected in Hubble Space Telescope images (not shown here). However, the expanding, ellipse-shaped shell of oxygen seen in N132D is not seen in either G292.0+1.8 or Puppis A, two oxygen-rich SNRs in the galaxy with similar ages to N132D (about 3,000 years, ten times older than Cas A). The origin of this shell is unknown, but it might have been created by a `nickel bubble' shortly after the supernova explosion, caused by radioactive energy input from nickel that was created by the explosion. The existence of such bubbles is predicted by theoretical work.
The ultimate goal of these observations is to constrain the mass of the star that exploded and to learn more about how massive stars explode and spread heavy elements like oxygen into surrounding space.
This year, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory celebrates its 20th year in space exploring the extreme universe.
Credit: NASA/CXC/NCSU/K.J.Borkowski et al.
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the dwarf irregular galaxy UGC 4879 or VV124. As this image illustrates, Hubble’s high resolution can detect individual stars, even in the densest parts of the galaxy. This allows astronomers to better determine the galaxy’s distance, and the composition and age of its stars.
UGC 4879 is an isolated dwarf galaxy, lying just beyond our own Local Group of galaxies some four million light-years away. Because of its isolation, astronomers are studying UGC 4879 to determine if it is a relatively undisturbed, old galaxy. Theories suggest that the lowest mass dwarf galaxies may have been the first galaxies to form. If UGC 4879 is a relic of the early universe, it could provide clues to the hierarchical structure and evolution of galaxies, galaxy clusters, and even the universe itself.
Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Chiboucas (NOIRLab - Gemini North (HI), and M. Monelli (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #astrophysics #NASA #galaxy #ESA #NASAGoddard #LargeMagellanicCloud #galaxy #dwarfgalaxy
The universe is getting bigger every second. The space between galaxies is stretching, like dough rising in the oven. But how fast is the universe expanding? As Hubble and other telescopes seek to answer this question, they have run into an intriguing difference between what scientists predict and what they observe.
This is a ground-based telescope's view of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. The inset image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, reveals one of many star clusters scattered throughout the dwarf galaxy. The cluster members include a special class of pulsating star called a Cepheid variable, which brightens and dims at a predictable rate that corresponds to its intrinsic brightness. Once astronomers determine that value, they can measure the light from these stars to calculate an accurate distance to the galaxy. When the new Hubble observations are correlated with an independent distance measurement technique to the Large Magellanic Cloud (using straightforward trigonometry), the researchers were able to strengthen the foundation of the so-called "cosmic distance ladder." This "fine-tuning" has significantly improved the accuracy of the rate at which the universe is expanding, called the Hubble constant.
Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Riess (STScI/JHU) and Palomar Digitized Sky Survey
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This is one of the prominent features of the Southern Hemisphere night sky, which first become known to western astronomers in the 16th Century when Magellan and other Portuguese explorers ventured south on their voyages of global exploration.
This is a stack of sixteen 2-minute images shot on a Fujifilm GFX 50R with a Fujinon GF80 at F/2.8, processed in Pixinsight and Photoshop.
The Moon illuminates the Very Large Telescope (VLT) as it sets in the West while the disk of our galaxy, The Milky Way, passes overhead in this time-lapse sequence composed of 1,000 thirty-second exposures. Paranal Observatory, Atacama Desert, Chile. 24 Aug 09.
© 2009 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
Explore #24 on 19 Dec 2009
See also:
Cumulative video, Milky Way still, 35-exp stack, Moonset, VLT at Dawn,
One of the first targets for my newly acquired Nikon 180mm f2.8 lens taken at Lake Eildon in Victoria, Australia. Very keen to try this with my h-apha enhanced 7D but I think the extra magnification of the crop sensor will make framing a little difficult.
Acquisition details:
20 x 1 minute subs @ ISO 1600
Unmodified Canon 6D, Nikon 180mm f2.8 @ f4
Astrotrac TT320X-AG
No calibration frames, stacked and edited in CC
A bubbling region of stars both old and new lies some 160,000 light-years away in the constellation Dorado. This complex cluster of emission nebulae is known as N11, and was discovered by American astronomer and NASA astronaut Karl Gordon Henize in 1956. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope brings a new image of the cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a nearby dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way.
About 1,000 light-years across, N11’s sprawling filaments weave stellar matter in and out of each other like sparkling candy floss. These cotton-spun clouds of gas are ionized by a burgeoning host of young and massive stars, giving the complex a cherry-pink appearance. Throughout N11, colossal cavities burst from the fog. These bubbles formed as a result of the vigorous emergence and death of stars contained in the nebulae. Their stellar winds and supernovae carved the surrounding area into shells of gas and dust.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. M. Apellaniz (Centro de Astrobiologia (CSIC/INTA Inst. Nac. de Tec. Aero.); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #astrophysics #NASA #galaxy #ESA #NASAGoddard #LargeMagellanicCloud #galaxy #dwarfgalaxy
This stunning new Hubble image shows a small part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the closest galaxies to our own. This collection of small baby stars, most weighing less than the Sun, form a young stellar cluster known as LH63. This cluster is still half-embedded in the cloud from which it was born, in a bright star-forming region known as the emission nebula LHA 120-N 51, or N51. This is just one of the hundreds of star-forming regions filled with young stars spread throughout the Large Magellanic Cloud. The burning red intensity of the nebulae at the bottom of the picture illuminates wisps of gas and dark dust, each spanning many light-years. Moving up and across, bright stars become visible as sparse specks of light, giving the impression of pin-pricks in a cosmic cloak. This patch of sky was the subject of observation by Hubble's WFPC2 camera. Looking for and at low-mass stars can help us to understand how stars behave when they are in the early stages of formation, and can give us an idea of how the Sun might have looked billions of years ago. A version of this image was submitted to the Hubble's Hidden Treasures image processing competition by contestant Luca Limatola.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Gouliermis (University of Heidelberg)
Acknowledgement: Luca Limatola
A Southern Hemisphere view of the Milky Way, with the Large Magellanic Cloud bottom left.
IRIX 15mm f2.4 Blackstone
Despite the drought that’s afflicted most of my home state of New South Wales, there is a lot of green in this photo. The poplar trees that had been bare during winter and earlier in our southern spring were well dressed in their foliage, and the paddocks behind them seemed to have had enough water to keep them looking just as green. On this night the sky was showing a lovely shade of green, too. That colour in the background sky comes from the atmospheric effect known as “airglow”, a feature of the night that our unaided eyes cannot see.
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds–companion galaxies that are travelling through space with our Milky Way–are the two distinct, fuzzy objects that are hanging in the heavens between the two poplars. Although they’re visible all year round, the summer months down here below the equator provide some of the best opportunities to see and photograph the two stellar sidekicks.
Photographed near the rural city of Nowra, Australia, in late October of 2019, I shot this single-frame image using a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, with an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.
The Large Magellanic Cloud imaged from the La Silla observatory in July 2019 with a Samyang 135 mm f/2.0 and an EOS 6D (astrodon) mounted on a star-adventurer mini.
332x15" @ ISO3200
Acquisition details on Astrobin
The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbors. Even though it is a small, or so-called dwarf galaxy, the SMC is so bright that it is visible to the unaided eye from the Southern Hemisphere and near the equator. Many navigators, including Ferdinand Magellan who lends his name to the SMC, used it to help find their way across the oceans.
Modern astronomers are also interested in studying the SMC (and its cousin, the Large Magellanic Cloud), but for very different reasons. Because the SMC is so close and bright, it offers an opportunity to study phenomena that are difficult to examine in more distant galaxies. New Chandra data of the SMC have provided one such discovery: the first detection of X-ray emission from young stars with masses similar to our Sun outside our Milky Way galaxy. The new Chandra observations of these low-mass stars were made of the region known as the "Wing" of the SMC. In this composite image of the Wing the Chandra data is shown in purple, optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope is shown in red, green and blue and infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope is shown in red.
Astronomers call all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium -- that is, with more than two protons in the atom's nucleus -- "metals." The Wing is a region known to have fewer metals compared to most areas within the Milky Way. There are also relatively lower amounts of gas, dust, and stars in the Wing compared to the Milky Way.
Taken together, these properties make the Wing an excellent location to study the life cycle of stars and the gas lying in between them. Not only are these conditions typical for dwarf irregular galaxies like the SMC, they also mimic ones that would have existed in the early Universe.
Most star formation near the tip of the Wing is occurring in a small region known as NGC 602, which contains a collection of at least three star clusters. One of them, NGC 602a, is similar in age, mass, and size to the famous Orion Nebula Cluster. Researchers have studied NGC 602a to see if young stars -- that is, those only a few million years old -- have different properties when they have low levels of metals, like the ones found in NGC 602a.
Using Chandra, astronomers discovered extended X-ray emission, from the two most densely populated regions in NGC 602a. The extended X-ray cloud likely comes from the population of young, low-mass stars in the cluster, which have previously been picked out by infrared and optical surveys, using Spitzer and Hubble respectively. This emission is not likely to be hot gas blown away by massive stars, because the low metal content of stars in NGC 602a implies that these stars should have weak winds. The failure to detect X-ray emission from the most massive star in NGC 602a supports this conclusion, because X-ray emission is an indicator of the strength of winds from massive stars. No individual low-mass stars are detected, but the overlapping emission from several thousand stars is bright enough to be observed.
The Chandra results imply that the young, metal-poor stars in NGC 602a produce X-rays in a manner similar to stars with much higher metal content found in the Orion cluster in our galaxy. The authors speculate that if the X-ray properties of young stars are similar in different
environments, then other related properties -- including the formation and evolution of disks where planets form -- are also likely to be similar.
X-ray emission traces the magnetic activity of young stars and is related to how efficiently their magnetic dynamo operates. Magnetic dynamos generate magnetic fields in stars through a process involving the star's speed of rotation, and convection, the rising and falling of hot gas in the star's interior.
The combined X-ray, optical and infrared data also revealed, for the first time outside our Galaxy, objects representative of an even younger stage of evolution of a star. These so-called "young stellar objects" have ages of a few thousand years and are still embedded in the pillar of dust and gas from which stars form, as in the famous "Pillars of Creation" of the Eagle Nebula.
A paper describing these results was published online and in the March 1, 2013 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The first author is Lidia Oskinova from the University of Potsdam in Germany and the co-authors are Wei Sun from Nanjing University, China; Chris Evans from the Royal
Observatory Edinburgh, UK; Vincent Henault-Brunet from University of Edinburgh, UK; You-Hua Chu from the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL; John Gallagher III from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI; Martin Guerrero from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain; Robert Gruendl from the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL; Manuel Gudel from the University of Vienna, Austria; Sergey Silich from the Instituto Nacional de Astrofısica Optica y Electr´onica, Puebla, Mexico; Yang Chen from Nanjing University, China; Yael Naze from Universite de Liege, Liege, Belgium; Rainer Hainich from the University of Potsdam, Germany, and Jorge Reyes-Iturbide from the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz, Ilheus, Brazil.
Read entire caption/view more images: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2013/ngc602/
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ.Potsdam/L.Oskinova et al; Optical: NASA/STScI; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
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1. Driving for an 1hr 1/2 only to break down at the first stop.
2. Miraculously car starts 30mins later but too risky to continue so turn around and take my buddies car instead.
3. Made it home, packed car and on our way again.
4. Scouting 3hrs 1/2 from Sydney and finally we stumbled across Smiths Lake in the north coast...
Jeep Diagnosis: Faulty fuel pump sensor, being fixed as I type.
Located in the outskirts of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the Tarantula Nebula is a massive object, visible in binoculars.
The LMC is a nearby small galaxy, 160,000 light years away and the Tarantula is an active starburst region of it.
Object Details:
NGC 2070, Caldwell 103, 30 Doradus.
Constellation: Dorado.
Visual magnitude: +8.0
Apparent diameter: 40 x 25.0 arc-min. (about 1.2 x 0.8 LD).
Actual diameter: 1833 light years.
Distance: 160,000 light years.
Also visible:
Included in this wide field image are around twenty other smaller objects which are listed in the NGC Catalogue, including: NGC 2042, NGC 2044, NGC 2050, NGC 2055, NGC 2060, NGC 2069, NGC 2074, NGC 2077, NGC 2078, NGC 2079, NGC 2080, NGC 2081, NGC 2083, NGC 2084, NGC 2085, NGC 2086, NGC 2091, NGC 2092, NGC 2093, NGC 2100, NGC 2102, NGC 2108.
Image:
Exposure: 32 x 2 min, ISO 1600.
Date: 2017-11-08.
Location: Leumeah, NSW.
Sky: suberban sky, clear.
Processing: Canon DPP > Deep Sky Stacker > GIMP.
Cropping: no.
Gear:
Imaging telescope: Skywatcher Esprit 120ED Super APO triplet refractor.
Focal length: 840 mm, focal ratio: f/7.
Imaging camera: Canon EOS 60D.
Guiding: off (due to Dec corrections failing).
Telescope mount: SkyWatcher EQ6-R.
Polar aligning: QHYCCD PoleMaster.
Field flattener: yes; filter: no.
The Tarantula Nebula is the most active starburst region known in the Local Group of Galaxies. The Local Group comprises more than 54 Galaxies (mostly dwarf Galaxies). The three largest members of the group (in descending order) are the Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy and the Triangulum Galaxy.
The Tarantula Nebula (also known as NGC 2070, the Doradus Nebula, or 30 Doradus) is a H II region in the very dense Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The LMC is one of the irregular satellite dwarf Galaxies of the Milky Way Galaxy, that is among the closest Galaxies to Earth. There is also a Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), both discovered by Magellan. The Magellanic Clouds are visible from the Southern Hemisphere with the naked eye.
About this image:
This wide field image consists of 12 x 2 minute exposures at ISO 3200. Photographed in the rural skies of North West Province, South Africa.
About the Star Colors:
You will notice that star colors differ from red, orange and yellow, to blue. This is an indication of the temperature of the star's Nuclear Fusion process. This is determined by the size and mass of the star, and the stage of its life cycle. In short, the blue stars are hotter, and the red ones are cooler.
About the Milky Way, and Earth's place within it:
The Milky Way Galaxy is estimated to have over 400 billion stars. Stars are suns, and just like in our Solar System, many of the stars have planets with moons orbiting them.
Our sun is a middle aged Yellow Dwarf star, located in the Orion Arm (or Orion Spur) of the Milky Way Galaxy. It’s a minor side spiral arm, located between two larger arms of the Milky Way Galaxy's spiral.
The Milky Way is merely one mid-sized barred spiral Galaxy, amongst over 100 billion other Galaxies in the observable Universe. When we look up at the night sky from Earth, we see a glimpse of the Carina–Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. It takes about 250 million years for the Milky Way Galaxy's spiral arms to complete one rotation.
The size, distance and age of the Universe is far beyond human comprehension. The known Universe is estimated to contain over One Billion Trillion stars.
1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000
Gear:
GSO 6" f/4 Imaging Newtonian Reflector Telescope.
Baader Mark-III MPCC Coma Corrector.
Astronomik CLS Light Pollution Filter.
Celestron SkySync GPS Accessory.
Orion Mini 50mm Guide Scope.
Orion StarShoot Autoguider.
Celestron AVX Mount.
QHYCCD PoleMaster.
Celestron StarSense.
Canon 60Da DSLR.
Tech:
Guiding in Open PHD 2.6.2.
Image acquisition in Sequence Generator Pro.
Lights/Subs: 12 x 120 sec. ISO 3200 CFA FIT Files.
Calibration Frames:
50 x Bias
33 x Darks
Linear workflow in PixInsight.
Finished in Photoshop.
Astrometry Info:
nova.astrometry.net/user_images/1278167#annotated
RA, Dec center: 84.5058051328, -69.30179156 degrees
Orientation: 0.880171695078 deg E of N
Pixel scale: 4.05301182595 arcsec/pixel
Martin
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Namibian sky above our campsite on top of Eagle Hill (Tented Camp Gecko). Left in the picture, near the horizon, one can see both Magellanic Clouds.
//
Der namibische Sternenhimmels über unserer Campsite auf dem Eagle Hill (Tented Camp Gecko). Links kann man beide Magellanschen Wolken sehen.
Nearly everything you see while looking at a cloud-free night sky is in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The Moon and the naked-eye visible planets (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn) are neighbours of our Earth in the Solar System. Beyond these local friends, every star–from bright Sirius to those only visible using averted vision–is a more distant member of our local community. You can count the naked-eye objects located beyond the solar system on one hand (even a Simpson’s hand).
Two of these extra-galactic companions are visible year-round from where I live in the Southern Hemisphere. Named for the explorer on whose round-the-world voyage western eyes first saw them, the “Magellanic Clouds” are dwarf galaxies travelling with the Milky Way as we orbit in the Local Group of galaxies. I photographed the wispy wonders in the pre-dawn sky at Narooma, Australia, in late January 2023.
To create this scene, I shot fifteen single-frame photos (10x light and 5x dark, for those who care) and used the app Starry Landscape Stacker to reduce digital noise in the final image. For each of those individual shots, I used my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera and a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.2, opening the shutter for 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.
Editor's Note: We have an unofficial Flickr movement afoot to rename this "Hope Nebula." :) What do YOU think?
This colorful creation was made by combining data from two of NASA's Great Observatories. Optical data of SNR 0509-67.5 and its accompanying star field, taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, are composited with X-ray energies from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The result shows soft green and blue hues of heated material from the X-ray data surrounded by the glowing pink optical shell which shows the ambient gas being shocked by the expanding blast wave from the supernova. Ripples in the shell's appearance coincide with brighter areas of the X-ray data.
The Type 1a supernova that resulted in the creation of SNR 0509-67.5 occurred nearly 400 years ago for Earth viewers. The supernova remnant, and its progenitor star reside in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small galaxy about 160,000 light-years from Earth. The bubble-shaped shroud of gas is 23 light-years across and is expanding at more than 11 million miles per hour (5,000 kilometers per second).
Data from Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, taken in 2006 with a filter that isolates light from glowing hydrogen were combined with visible-light images of the surrounding star field that were imaged with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 in 2010. These data were then merged with X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory taken with the Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS) in 2000 and 2007.
Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/J.Hughes et al, Optical: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Read entire caption/view more images: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2010/snr0509/
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
25-sec exposures. Nikon D700 (ISO 2500) & D3 (ISO 3200) + Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8G lenses
ALMA under construction, Llano de Chajnantor Observatory, Chile, night of 16/17 June 2010.
© 2010 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
Taken from Savannah Skies Observatory using a Canon EOS Ra and 400 mm lens.
LINK
Other images from this series:
1. M8 and M20: www.flickr.com/photos/jbrimacombe/51050919231/
2. M16: www.flickr.com/photos/jbrimacombe/51050319198/
3. NGC 6188: www.flickr.com/photos/jbrimacombe/51051043096/
4. M78: www.flickr.com/photos/jbrimacombe/51050317763/
5. Rho Ophiuchus: www.flickr.com/photos/jbrimacombe/51051288802/
6. Tarantula Nebula: www.flickr.com/photos/jbrimacombe/51051288607/
7. Vela SNR: www.flickr.com/photos/jbrimacombe/51050478748/
This image from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features an H II region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. This nebula, known as N79, is a region of interstellar atomic hydrogen that is ionised, captured here by Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI).
N79 is a massive star-forming complex spanning roughly 1630 light-years in the generally unexplored southwest region of the LMC. N79 is typically regarded as a younger version of 30 Doradus (also known as the Tarantula Nebula), another of Webb’s recent targets. Research suggests that N79 has a star formation efficiency exceeding that of 30 Doradus by a factor of two over the past 500 000 years.
This particular image centres on one of the three giant molecular cloud complexes, dubbed N79 South (S1 for short). The distinct ‘starburst’ pattern surrounding this bright object is a series of diffraction spikes. All telescopes which use a mirror to collect light, as Webb does, have this form of artifact which arises from the design of the telescope. In Webb's case, the six largest starburst spikes appear because of the hexagonal symmetry of Webb's 18 primary mirror segments. Patterns like these are only noticeable around very bright, compact objects, where all the light comes from the same place. Most galaxies, even though they appear very small to our eyes, are darker and more spread out than a single star, and therefore do not show this pattern.
At the longer wavelengths of light captured by MIRI, Webb’s view of N79 showcases the region’s glowing gas and dust. This is because mid-infrared light is able to reveal what is happening deeper inside the clouds (while shorter wavelengths of light would be absorbed or scattered by dust grains in the nebula). Some still-embedded protostars also appear in this field.
Star-forming regions such as this are of interest to astronomers because their chemical composition is similar to that of the gigantic star-forming regions observed when the Universe was only a few billion years old and star formation was at its peak. Star-forming regions in our Milky Way galaxy are not producing stars at the same furious rate as N79, and have a different chemical composition. Webb is now providing astronomers the opportunity to compare and contrast observations of star formation in N79 with the telescope’s deep observations of distant galaxies in the early Universe.
These observations of N79 are part of a Webb programme that is studying the evolution of the circumstellar discs and envelopes of forming stars over a wide range in mass and at different evolutionary stages. Webb’s sensitivity will enable scientists to detect for the first time the planet-forming dust discs around stars of similar mass to that of our Sun at the distance of the LMC.
This image includes 7.7-micron light shown in blue, 10 microns in cyan, 15 microns in yellow, and 21 microns in red (770W, 1000W, 1500W, and 2100W filters, respectively).
[Image description: A bright young star within a colourful nebula. The star is identifiable as the brightest spot in the image, surrounded by six large spokes of light that cross the image. A number of other bright spots can also be seen in the clouds, which are shown in great detail as layers of colourful wisps.]
Credits: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, O. Nayak, M. Meixner
This composite image shows a superbubble in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way located about 160,000 light years from Earth. Many new stars, some of them very massive, are forming in the star cluster NGC 1929, which is embedded in the nebula N44, so named because it is the 44th nebula in a catalog of such objects in the Magellanic Clouds. The massive stars produce intense radiation, expel matter at high speeds, and race through their evolution to explode as supernovas. The winds and supernova shock waves carve out huge cavities called superbubbles in the surrounding gas. X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue) show hot regions created by these winds and shocks, while infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (red) outline where the dust and cooler gas are found. The optical light from the 2.2-m Max-Planck-ESO telescope (yellow) in Chile shows where ultraviolet radiation from hot, young stars is causing gas in the nebula to glow.
A long-running problem in high-energy astrophysics has been that some superbubbles in the LMC, including N44, give off a lot more X-rays than expected from models of their structure. These models assume that hot, X-ray emitting gas has been produced by winds from massive stars and the remains of several supernovas. A Chandra study published in 2011 showed that there are two extra sources of N44’s X-ray emission not included in these models: supernova shock waves striking the walls of the cavities, and hot material evaporating from the cavity walls. The Chandra observations also show no evidence for an enhancement of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium in the cavities, thus ruling out this possibility as a third explanation for the bright X-ray emission. Only with long observations making full use of the capabilities of Chandra has it now become possible to distinguish between different sources of the X-rays produced by superbubbles.
The Chandra study of N44 and another superbubble in the LMC was led by Anne Jaskot from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The co-authors were Dave Strickland from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, Sally Oey from University of Michigan, You-Hua Chu from University of Illinois and Guillermo Garcia-Segura from Instituto de Astronomia-UNAM in Ensenada, Mexico.
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.
Read entire caption/view more images: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2012/n1929/
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/U.Mich./S.Oey, IR: NASA/JPL, Optical: ESO/WFI/2.2-m
Caption credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Read more about Chandra:
p.s. You can see all of our Chandra photos in the Chandra Group in Flickr at: www.flickr.com/groups/chandranasa/ We'd love to have you as a member!
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Astronomers love acronyms. The Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the South Celestial Pole (SCP) photographed from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST). 1,067 thirty-sec exposures spanning more than 8.5 hours. The disk of our galaxy, The Milky Way, the irregular galaxies Small and Large Magellanic Clouds (SMC and LMC, respectively) are clearly visible in this time-lapse sequence. The Moon sets towards the beginning of the video. Paranal Observatory, Atacama Desert, Chile, 24-25 Aug 2009 (Nikon D700).
© 2009 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
Explore #459 on 16 Dec 2009
See the cumulative video, meteor shot, Milky Way shot, Magellanic Clouds shot
To celebrate the coming New Year, here are fireworks from the Large Magellanic Cloud! The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of a stellar explosion throwing out sheets of debris in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy on July 7, 2003. Since its 1990 launch, Hubble has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe; with over 1.5 million observations and 20,000+ papers published on its discoveries, Hubble is the most productive science mission in the history of NASA.
Image credit: NASA, STScI/AURA
#NASA #STScI #NASAGoddard #NASAMarshall #galaxy #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #galaxy #LargeMagellanicCloud #NYE #NewYearsEve
Posing here under the splendours of the southern sky is Babak A. Tafreshi, one of ESO’s Photo Ambassadors. Babak is standing on part of the massive Miñiques volcanic complex, located in the Antofagasta region of Chile’s Atacama Desert. This region is also home to ESO’s Paranal Observatory, where the Very Large Telescope (VLT) gazes up at the sky, observing exotic phenomena such as gamma-ray bursts, extrasolar planets, and supermassive black holes.
Each of the VLT’s constituent telescopes can detect objects roughly four billion times fainter than the naked eye can see, giving it a far richer view of the Universe than is available to humans. However, the skies above the Atacama are some of the clearest and darkest in the world — so it’s little wonder that Babak stands in awe beneath it all.
The spectacular swirl of blue above Babak’s head is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. It is part of the Local Group and is the third closest galaxy to us, lying approximately 163 000 light-years away. The LMC used to be classified as an irregular galaxy, but astronomers now think it was originally a barred spiral galaxy before its shape was distorted by the gravitational influence of the Milky Way and the nearby Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). A bridge of gas filled with protostars connects the SMC to the LMC, providing evidence of tidal interactions between the two galaxies.
Credit:
ESO/P. Horálek
Planewave CDK 431mm F6.8, FLI Proline 16803
5 x 600s in H-alpha
6 x 600s in OIII
3 x 600s in SII
All bin1x1, processing and editing done in PixInsight 1.8 and final tweaks in DxO PhotoLab 2.
Color palette mixing ratios aren't Hubble but something close : blues are oxygen, oranges are hydrogen, reds are sulfur.
Back in late September and early October 2018, I booked T32 in Siding Spring Observatory (Australia, part of iTelescope.net) over 3 nights to image a small part of the Large Magellanic Cloud through narrowband filters.
The telescope performed moderately well with some images slightly out of focus, but the most difficult part for me was dealing with column defects on the CCD sensor. I tediously listed 73 by hand, and some of them still show up after processing ... I was hoping to find the energy to find a solution and re-do it all, but after 6 months I give up ...
NGC 2070, the Tarantula Nebula, and surrounding nebulosity in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Tarantula is a massive area of star formation in another galaxy, the nearby LMC in the Local Group of galaxies the Milky Way belongs to. This object, despite being 160,000 light years away, is large and bright enough to see with the unaided eye, but it can be seen only from the southern hemisphere.
The images for this stack were taken January 17, 2019, under a program I uploaded to iTelescope, the robotic telescope subscription service with observatories around the world. This was with the 11-inch Celestron Rowe-Ackerman Schmidt Astrograph, T68, at the Bathurst Observatory in NSW. It is a stack of 8 x 30-second, 8 x 60-second, and one 2-minute exposure, all at f/2.2 with a ZWO 1600 one-shot color CCD camera. The short exposures add the bright core area, to prevent it from being blown out. However, I should have programmed in more long exposures, despite the fast f/2.2 speed of the RASA astrograph.
The different exposure sets are blended with luminosity masks. so the short exposures contribute just the bright areas — the nebula cores and bright stars.
The small rich star cluster at left is NGC 2100; the middle nebula of the complex at bottom is NGC 2077. The nebulas in the LMC seem to have a lot of cyan from oxygen emission and are not the deep red of more usual hydrogen-alpha nebulas in the Milky Way.
North is at top in this orientation, with east at left, to match the usual naked eye and binocular view as you view the LMC looking south. The camera’s long axis seems to be oriented north-south, not east-west. Plus being at the prime focus of the RASA astrograph raw images are flipped mirror image and so need re-flipping to make them match the sky.
This was my first iTelescope session and target, so the program of exposures was a test and experiment. But overall it worked OK. However, it took of month with a couple of reschedules due to cloud and other bookings on this popular telescope to get the images. The images were taken about 2 am local time in NSW, with the gibbous Moon low and setting. And it was a hot summer night in Oz! The field was at a fairly high alitude but perhaps some light haze added the glows and softened the stars – it’s hard to tell. The skycam seemed to show clear skies but some haze toward the horizon.
Pointing was by selecting the object name as the frame centre, but aiming and framing by coordinates would have produced a little better framing to include more of the complex of nebulosity at bottom. But not bad for a first attempt at an iTelescope robotic session.
The Dark Emu from aboriginal sky lore rising in the east, on a late March evening in Australia. The Dark Emu is a “constellation” made of dark lanes in the Milky Way. Here, his head and beak are at centre as the dark Coal Sack beside the Southern Cross. The Emu’s neck extends down along the Milky Way through Centaurus and into Scorpius, which is just rising here. Antares and the head of Scoripius are at botttom left above the gum trees, with bright Mars to the left of Antares. The glow at upper left is the Gegenschein.
This scene encompasses much of the splendours of the southern hemisphere sky, including the Large Magellanic Cloud at right, and the Carina Nebula, the red patch right of top centre. At centre is the Southern Cross, or Crux. Below it are the paired stars of Alpha and Beta Centauri.
The foreground is illuminated only by starlight, though when I shot this the last quarter Moon was about to rise and so was beginning to light the sky a deep blue.
This is a stack of 5 x 2 minute tracked exposures at f/3.2 with the 15mm full-frame fish-eye lens, and filter-modified Canon 5D MkII at ISO 3200 for the sky, plus a single untracked exposure at ISO 800 for 8 minutes at f/2.8 for the ground to eliminate blurring. I shot the ground shot immediately after the last sky shot, by simply turning off the tracker’s motor.
Where the two images, tracked sky and untracked ground, meet there are blurred silhouettes of the trees. I used the iOptron SkyTracker.
Satellite Galaxy of the Milky Way
Taken with a 60mm Refractor Telescope at 374mm.
Moravian G3-11000 camera
5.5 hours of Hydrogen-alpha, 5-hours of OIII through 7nm NB Filters. (10.5 hours total)
RGB Combined as HOO + HGsynO (Green synthesised from H and O).
The very bright Tarantula Nebula (also known as 30 Doradus or the Doradus Nebula) is an H II region in the very dense Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The Tarantula Nebula is the most active starburst region known in the Local Group of Galaxies.
About this image:
This wide field image consists of 14 x 2 minute exposures at ISO 6400. Photographed in the rural dark skies of the Karoo (Northern Cape, South Africa).
About the Star Colors:
You will notice that star colors differ from red, orange and yellow, to blue. This is an indication of the temperature of the star's Nuclear Fusion process. This is determined by the size and mass of the star, and the stage of its life cycle. In short, the blue stars are hotter, and the red ones are cooler.
Gear:
GSO 6" f/4 Imaging Newtonian Reflector Telescope.
Baader Mark-III MPCC Coma Corrector.
Astronomik CLS Light Pollution Filter.
Orion StarShoot Autoguider.
Aurora Flatfield Panel.
Celestron AVX Mount.
Celestron StarSense.
Canon 60Da DSLR.
Tech:
Guiding in Open PHD 2.6.1.
Image acquisition in Sequence Generator Pro.
Lights/Subs: 14 x 120 sec. ISO 6400 CFA FIT Files.
Calibration Frames:
50 x Bias
30 x Darks
20 x Flats
Pre-Processing and Linear workflow in PixInsight,
and finished in Photoshop.
Astrometry Info:
nova.astrometry.net/user_images/1191958#annotated
RA, Dec center: 84.5358996211, -69.1714612158 degrees
Orientation: 1.16214860863 deg E of N
Pixel scale: 6.80102321917 arcsec/pixel
Martin
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This image shows a region of space called LHA 120-N150.
More information: spacetelescope.org/news/heic2004/
Credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, I. Stephens
For this ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week, we gaze upon the field of stars that is NGC 1786. This object is a globular cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way Galaxy that is approximately 160 000 light-years away from Earth. NGC 1786 itself is in the constellation Dorado. It was discovered in the year 1835 by John Herschel.
The data for this image comes from an observing programme comparing old globular clusters in nearby dwarf galaxies — the LMC, the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy — to the globular clusters in the Milky Way galaxy. Our galaxy contains over 150 of these old, spherical collections of tightly-bound stars, which have been studied in depth — especially with Hubble Space Telescope images like this one, which show them in previously-unattainable detail. Being very stable and long-lived, they act as galactic time capsules, preserving stars from the earliest stages of a galaxy’s formation.
Astronomers once thought that the stars in a globular cluster all formed together at about the same time, but study of the old globular clusters in our galaxy has uncovered multiple populations of stars with different ages. In order to use globular clusters as historical markers, we must understand how they form and where these stars of varying ages come from. This observing programme examined old globular clusters like NGC 1786 in these external galaxies to see if they, too, contain multiple populations of stars. This research can tell us more not only about how the LMC was originally formed, but the Milky Way Galaxy, too.
[Image Description: A cluster of stars in space. It’s bright in the centre, where the stars are densely packed together in the cluster’s core, and grows dimmer and more diffuse out to the edges, as the stars give way to the dark background of space. A few orange stars are spread across the cluster, but most are pale, bluish-white points of light. Three large stars with cross-shaped spikes around them lie between us and the cluster.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Monelli; CC BY 4.0
Acknowledgements: M. H. Özsaraç
Today’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week features a sparkling cloudscape from one of the Milky Way’s galactic neighbours, a dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Located 160 000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa, the Large Magellanic Cloud is the largest of the Milky Way’s many small satellite galaxies.
This view of dusty gas clouds in the Large Magellanic Cloud is possible thanks to Hubble’s cameras, such as the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) that was used to collect the observations for this image. WFC3 is equipped with a variety of filters, each of which lets through only specific wavelengths, or colours, of light. This image combines observations made with five different filters, including some that capture ultraviolet and infrared light that the human eye cannot see.
The wispy gas clouds in this image resemble brightly coloured candyfloss. When viewing such a vividly coloured cosmic scene, it is natural to wonder whether the colours are ‘real’. After all, Hubble, with its 2.4 metre-wide mirror and advanced scientific instruments, doesn’t bear resemblance to a typical camera! When image-processing specialists combine raw filtered data into a multi-coloured image like this one, they assign a colour to each filter. Visible-light observations are typically matched to the colour that the filter allows through. Shorter wavelengths of light such as ultraviolet are usually coloured blue or purple, while longer wavelengths like infrared are typically coloured red.
This colour scheme closely represents reality while adding new information from the portions of the electromagnetic spectrum that humans cannot see. However, there are endless possible colour combinations that can be employed to achieve an especially aesthetically pleasing or scientifically insightful image.
[Image Description: A part of a nebula in space. It is made of layers of gas and dust clouds in different colours, from blue and green shades to pink, red and black, indicating light emitted by different molecules. The background cloud layers are thicker and puffier, though still translucent, and the upper layers are thin and bright at the edges. Behind the clouds are very many small, mostly orange and some blue, stars.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray; CC BY 4.0