View allAll Photos Tagged LargeMagellanicCloud
Evidence of a supernova remnant in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Apparently the leading edge of an otherwise invisible (in these wavelengths) bubble expanding outward and colliding with some gas, which causes that gas to glow nicely.
I've long thought this one of the strangest patches of glowing gas. Every once in a while I see the image almost at random, and I always pause for it. Decided to process it myself just to stare at it some more. Looks like a balloon popped in space.
Data from the following proposals were used to create this image:
High Resolution Imaging of Bubble and Superbubbles in HII Regions
Supernova Remnants in a Cloudy Interstellar Medium
Orange: F673N WFPC2/WF
Cyan: F656N WFPC2/WF
Blue: F502N WFPC2/WF
North is NOT up. It is 40.2° clockwise from up.
This fish-eye lens view takes in the southern Milky Way, from Scorpius rising at lower left in the east (though partly behind trees here), to Orion setting at upper right in the west. At centre are the bright starclouds of Carina and Centaurus, along with the Southern Cross, Crux, and the dark Coal Sack. To the left of the Coal Sack are the stars Alpha and Beta Centauri, the Pointers.
At right is the huge magenta Gum Nebula in Vela and Puppis. To its left are the stars of the False Cross in Vela and Carina. The "Dark Emu" made of dust lanes in the Milky Way is rising at lower left.
At upper right south of Orion is Sirius, while at bottom above the Large Magellanic Cloud is the star Canopus, for a framing of the night sky's two brightest stars.
This illustrates how from the southern hemisphere Orion and Scorpius can be seen in the sky at the same time, contrary to the mythogical story of their fate and placement in the sky after their battle.
The faint glow of the Zodiacal Band can be seen at upper left.
This is a stack of 4 x 4 minute exposures with the TTArtisan 11mm full-frame fish-eye lens wide open at f/2.8 on the modified Canon R camera at ISO 800. The camera had a clip-in filter installed – an Astronomik UV/IR Cut filter, which for this lens improves its off-axis performance. The camera was on the iOptron SkyTracker, taken from the Warrumbungles Mountain Motel during the 2024 OzSky Star Safari in March 2024.
Milky Way, Large and Small Magellanic Clouds and Jupiter. Note the strong orange / green atmospheric phenomenon known as airglow. The distant lights of the town of Coonabarabran can be seen as well.
Taken from an entryway under the AAT 4 Metre dome that was somewhat sheltered from the wind. Shot in April, 2018 during the inaugural Astrophotography / iTelescope Masterclass held by Dr. Christian Sasse at Siding Spring Observatory, NSW, Australia.
Canon 6D, Rokinon 14mm
Starry sky above Mount Blutkuppe / Namib Naukluft National Park
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Sternenhimmel über der Blutkuppe im Namib-Naukluft Nationalpark
With our city of Sydney, Australia currently in lockdown due to the COVID-19 Delta variant, I find it liberating to look at my night-sky photos. The images are a reminder that I’ll be back out under the stars once again–hopefully soon–breathing the fresh country air and appreciating how good life can be.
I shot this photo of the ghostly remnant of a gum tree–an Australian eucalypt–under the Magellanic Cloud galaxies when I stayed at Tuross Head, New South Wales, back in early June. The purplish tinge of the atmospheric airglow that was prominent in the sky on the night provided a lovely backdrop for the blue-white wisps of light known as the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. If you look at the sky over the top-left half of the tree, you can see some dark patches punctuating the brighter background. These disturbances are caused by a phenomenon known as gravity waves, which are not to be confused with the more enigmatic “gravitational waves” that were first detected in 2015.
Today’s photo is a single-frame image that I shot with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Sigma 35mm f/1.4 Art lens @ f/2.8, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.
at 3.30am a few mornings ago and stepped outside to see this. A particularly brilliant starry night, too good not to take some photos of.
The small blur between the center and the top right, is the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the closest galaxies to our own, only visible in the southern hemisphere and one of only a handful that are visible unaided.
There is also a small meteor visible between the branches on the left.
Chandra is celebrating 10 years of operation. Here's a bright beauty from 2006.
This is a composite image of N49, the brightest supernova remnant in optical light in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Chandra X-ray image (blue) shows million-degree gas in the center. Much cooler gas at the outer parts of the remnant is seen in the infrared image from Spitzer (red). While astronomers expected that dust particles were generating most of the infrared emission, the study of this object indicates that much of the infrared is instead generated in heated gas.
The unique filamentary structure seen in the optical image by Hubble (white & yellow) has long set N49 apart from other well understood supernova remnants, as most supernova remnants appear roughly circular in visible light. Recent mapping of molecular clouds suggests that this supernova remnant is expanding into a denser region to the southeast, which would cause its asymmetrical appearance. This idea is confirmed by the Chandra data. Although X-rays reveal a round shell of emission, the X-rays also show brightening in the southeast, confirming the idea of colliding material in that area.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Caltech/S.Kulkarni et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI/UIUC/Y.H.Chu & R.Williams et al.; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R.Gehrz et al.
Read more about this image:
www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/n49/
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!
This scene of stellar creation, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, sits near the outskirts of the famous Tarantula Nebula, the largest known stellar nursery in the local universe. Called LHA 120-N 150, this cloud of gas and dust, along with the many young and massive stars surrounding it, is the perfect laboratory to study the origin of massive stars. The nebula is situated more than 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighboring dwarf irregular galaxy that orbits our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Also known as 30 Doradus or NGC 2070, the Tarantula Nebula owes its name to the arrangement of bright patches that somewhat resemble the legs of a tarantula. It measures nearly 1,000 light-years across. Its proximity, the favorable inclination of the Large Magellanic Cloud, and the absence of intervening dust make the Tarantula Nebula one of the best laboratories in which to study the formation of stars, in particular massive stars. This nebula has an exceptionally high concentration of massive stars, often referred to as super star clusters.
Astronomers have studied LHA 120-N 150 to learn more about the environment in which massive stars form. Theoretical models of the formation of massive stars suggest that they should form within clusters of stars; but observations indicate that up to ten percent of them also formed in isolation. The giant Tarantula Nebula with its numerous substructures is the perfect laboratory in which to resolve this puzzle as in it massive stars can be found both as members of clusters and in isolation.
With the help of Hubble, astronomers are trying to find out whether the isolated stars visible in the nebula truly formed alone or just moved away from their stellar siblings. However, such a study is not an easy task; young stars, before they are fully formed — especially massive ones — look very similar to dense clumps of dust.
LHA 120-N 150 contains several dozen of these objects. They are a mix of unclassified sources — some probably young stellar objects and others probably dust clumps. Only detailed analysis and observations will reveal their true nature, and that will help to finally solve the unanswered question of the origin of massive stars.
For more information, please visit:
www.spacetelescope.org/videos/heic2004a/
Image credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA, I. Stephens
Text credit: European Space Agency
This striking image shows the densely packed globular cluster known as NGC 2210, which is situated in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The LMC lies about 157 000 light-years from Earth, and is a so-called satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, meaning that the two galaxies are gravitationally bound. Globular clusters are very stable, tightly bound clusters of thousands or even millions of stars. Their stability means that they can last a long time, and therefore globular clusters are often studied in order to investigate potentially very old stellar populations.
In fact, 2017 research that made use of some of the data that were also used to build this image revealed that a sample of LMC globular clusters were incredibly close in age to some of the oldest stellar clusters found in the Milky Way’s halo. They found that NGC 2210 specifically probably clocks in at around 11.6 billion years of age. Even though this is only a couple of billion years younger than the Universe itself, it made NGC 2210 by far the youngest globular cluster in their sample. All other LMC globular clusters studied in the same work were found to be even older, with four of them over 13 billion years old. This is interesting, because it tells astronomers that the oldest globular clusters in the LMC formed contemporaneously with the oldest clusters in the Milky Way, even though the two galaxies formed independently.
As well as being a source of interesting research, this old-but-relatively-young cluster is also extremely beautiful, with its highly concentrated population of stars. The night sky would look very different from the perspective of an inhabitant of a planet orbiting one of the stars in a globular cluster’s centre: the sky would appear to be stuffed full of stars, in a stellar environment that is thousands of times more crowded than our own.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Sarajedini, F. Niederhofer; CC BY 4.0
Portrayed in this image from ESA’s Planck satellite are the two Magellanic Clouds, among the nearest companions of our Milky Way galaxy. The Large Magellanic Cloud, about 160 000 light-years away, is the large red and orange blob close to the centre of the image. The Small Magellanic Cloud, some 200 000 light-years from us, is the vaguely triangular-shaped object to the lower left.
At around ten and seven billion times the mass of our Sun, respectively, these are classed as dwarf galaxies. As a comparison, the Milky Way and another of its neighbours, the Andromeda galaxy, boast masses of a few hundred billion solar masses each.
The Magellanic Clouds are not visible from high northern latitudes and were introduced to European astronomy only at the turn of the 16th century. However, they were known long before by many civilisations in the southern hemisphere, as well as by Middle Eastern astronomers.
Planck detected the dust between the stars pervading the Magellanic Clouds while surveying the sky to study the cosmic microwave background – the most ancient light in the Universe – in unprecedented detail. In fact, Planck detected emission from virtually anything that shone between itself and the cosmic background at its sensitive frequencies.
These foreground contributions include many galaxies, near and far, as well as interstellar material in the Milky Way. Astronomers need to remove them in order to access the wealth of cosmic information contained in the ancient light. But, as a bonus, they can use the foreground observations to learn more about how stars form in galaxies, including our own.
Interstellar dust from the diffuse medium that permeates our Galaxy can be seen as the mixture of red, orange and yellow clouds in the upper part of this image, which belong to a large star-forming complex in the southern constellation, Chameleon.
In addition, a filament can also be seen stretching from the dense clouds of Chameleon, in the upper left, towards the opposite corner of the image.
Apparently located between the two Magellanic Clouds as viewed from Planck, this dusty filament is in fact much closer to us, only about 300 light-years away. The image shows how well this structure is aligned with the galaxy’s magnetic field, which is represented as the texture of the image and was estimated from Planck’s measurements.
By comparing the structure of the magnetic field and the distribution of interstellar dust in the Milky Way, scientists can study the relative distribution of interstellar clouds and the ambient magnetic field. While in the case of the filamentary cloud portrayed in this image, the structure is aligned with the direction of the magnetic field, in the denser clouds where stars form filaments tend to be perpendicular to the interstellar magnetic field.
The lower right part of the image is one of the faintest areas of the sky at Planck’s frequencies, with the blue hues indicating very low concentrations of cosmic dust. Similarly, the eddy-like structure of the texture is caused primarily by instrument noise rather than by actual features in the magnetic field.
The emission from dust is computed from a combination of Planck observations at 353, 545 and 857 GHz, whereas the direction of the magnetic field is based on Planck polarisation data at 353 GHz. The image spans about 40º.
Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration
An opportune capture of the Chinese unmanned space station Tiangong 1 passing between the two bright stars of Canopus (centre) and Sirius (upper right). Also in this photo, spanning from the Carina Nebula (far left) to the Orion Nebula (far right), are the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxies, and some thin Earth-clouds (lower right) lit by the last of the setting Sun.
This beautiful composite image shows N49, the aftermath of a supernova explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud. A new long observation from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, shown in blue, reveals evidence for a bullet-shaped object being blown out of debris field left over from an exploded star.
In order to detect this bullet, a team of researchers led by Sangwook Park of Penn State University used Chandra to observe N49 for over 30 hours. This bullet can be seen in the bottom right hand corner of the image (see the labeled version of the image) and is rich in silicon, sulphur and neon. The detection of this bullet shows that the explosion that destroyed the star was highly asymmetric.
The bullet is traveling at a high speed of about 5 million miles an hour away from a bright point source in the upper left part of N49. This bright source may be a so-called soft gamma ray repeater (SGR), a source that emits bursts of gamma rays and X-rays. A leading explanation for these objects is that they are neutron stars with extremely powerful magnetic fields. Since neutron stars are often created in supernova explosions, an association between SGRs and supernova remnants is not unexpected. This case is strengthened by the apparent alignment between the bullet's path and the bright X-ray source. However, the new Chandra data also shows that the bright source is more obscured by gas than expected if it really lies inside the supernova remnant. In other words, it is possible that the bright X-ray source actually lies beyond the remnant and is projected along the line of sight. Another possible bullet is located on the opposite side of the remnant, but it is harder to see in the image because it overlaps with the bright emission - described below - from the shock- cloud interaction.
Optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (yellow and purple) shows bright filaments where the shock wave generated by the supernova is interacting with the densest regions in nearby clouds of cool, molecular gas.
Using the new Chandra data, the age of N49 -- as it appears in the image -- is thought to be about 5,000 years and the energy of the explosion is estimated to be about twice that of an average supernova. These preliminary results suggest that the original explosion was caused by the collapse of a massive star.
Read entire caption/view more images: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2010/n49/
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State/S. Park et al. Optical: NASA/STScI/UIUC/Y.H. Chu & R. Williams et al.
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!
This composite image shows the superbubble DEM L50 (a.k.a. N186) located in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light years from Earth. Superbubbles are found in regions where massive stars have formed in the last few million years. 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 are shown in pink and optical data from the Magellanic Cloud Emission Line Survey (MCELS) are colored in red, green and blue. The MCELS data were obtained with the University of Michigan's 0.9-meter Curtis Schmidt telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). The shape of DEM L50 is approximately an ellipse, with a supernova remnant named SNR N186 D located on its northern edge.
Like another superbubble in the LMC, N44, DEM L50 gives off about 20 times more X-rays than expected from standard models for the evolution of superbubbles. A Chandra study published in 2011 showed that there are two extra sources of the bright X-ray emission: supernova shock waves striking the walls of the cavities, and hot material evaporating from the cavity walls.
The Chandra study of DEM L50 was published in the Astrophysical Journal in 2011 and was led by Anne Jaskot from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The Chandra study of DEM L50 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/2013/deml50/
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ of Michigan/A.E.Jaskot, Optical: NOAO/CTIO/MCELS
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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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 please visit: www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelin...
Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds above our campsite at Blutkuppe mountain. The light around the Blutkuppe is a result of another campfire behind the Blutkuppe mountain.
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Milchstraße und beide Magellansche Wolken über unserem Nachtlager an der Blutkuppe. Das Licht hinter dem Berg kommt von einer anderen Feustelle auf der anderen Seite der Blutkuppe.
This is a globular cluster located in the outskirts of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The reason it looks so colorful is because it was imaged in red/near-infrared (the red channel filter overlaps both) and near-ultraviolet. HST is one of the only observatories still in operation capable of ultraviolet observations due to its location above Earth's atmosphere. Astronomers are especially keen to make use of its ultraviolet abilities before the harsh environment of space takes its inevitable toll on the telescope. Yes, the telescope will eventually stop working altogether, but even before that happens, the detectors which pick up ultraviolet light are also quickly losing sensitivity.
Globular clusters typically take on an overall muted yellow color in visible spectrum images, but the near-infrared and near-ultraviolet filters are very good at highlighting what might otherwise be subtle differences and the result is a beautifully colorful image. You might also notice the faint red apparitions of galaxies in the background. They are relatively faint in ultraviolet light, so they appear unusually red in this particular image, but their shapes are unmistakably galactic.
Data from the following proposals were used to create this image.
Multiple Stellar Populations in Young Magellanic Cloud Clusters
Red: WFC3/UVIS F814W
Green: WFC3/UVIS F336W
Blue: WFC3/UVIS F225W
North is 2.3° clockwise from up.
This densely populated group of stars is the globular cluster known as NGC 1841, which is found within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way galaxy that lies about 162 000 light-years away. Satellite galaxies are galaxies that are bound by gravity in orbits around a more massive host galaxy. We typically think of our galaxy’s nearest galactic companion as being the Andromeda Galaxy, but it would be more accurate to say that Andromeda is the nearest galaxy that is not in orbit around the Milky Way galaxy. In fact, our galaxy is orbited by tens of known satellite galaxies that are far closer than Andromeda, the largest and brightest of which is the LMC, which is easily visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere (although this is decreasingly the case thanks to light pollution).
The LMC is home to many globular clusters. These celestial bodies fall somewhere between open clusters — which are much less dense and tightly bound — and small, compact galaxies. Increasingly sophisticated observations have revealed the stellar populations and other characteristics of globular clusters to be varied and complex, and it is not well understood how these tightly-packed clusters form. However, there are certain consistencies across all globular clusters: they are very stable and so are capable of lasting a long time, and can therefore be very old. This means that globular clusters often contain large numbers of very old stars, which make them something akin to celestial ‘fossils’. Just as fossils provide insight into the early development of life on Earth, globular clusters such as NGC 1841 can provide insights into very early star formation in galaxies.
[Image Description: A cluster of stars. Most of the stars are very small and uniform in size, and they are notably bluish and cluster more densely together towards the centre of the image. Some appear larger in the foreground. The stars give way to a dark background at the corners.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Sarajedini, F. Niederhofer; CC BY 4.0
The globular cluster NGC 2005, featured in this Hubble Picture of the Week, is not unusual in and of itself; but it is a peculiarity in relation to its surroundings. NGC 2005 is located about 750 light-years from the heart of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), which is the Milky Way’s largest satellite galaxy and which itself lies about 162 000 light-years from Earth. Globular clusters are densely-packed clusters that can constitute tens of thousands or millions of stars. Their density means that they are tightly gravitationally bound and are therefore very stable. This stability contributes to their longevity: globular clusters can be billions of years old, and as such often comprise very old stars. Thus, studying globular clusters in space can be a little like studying fossils on Earth: where fossils give insights into the characteristics of ancient plants and animals, globular clusters illuminate the characteristics of ancient stars.
Current theories of galaxy evolution predict that galaxies merge with one another. It is widely thought that the relatively large galaxies that we observe in the modern Universe were formed via the merging of smaller galaxies. If this is correct, then astronomers would expect to see evidence that the most ancient stars in nearby galaxies originated in different galactic environments. As globular clusters are known to contain ancient stars, and because of their stability, they are an excellent laboratory to test this hypothesis.
NGC 2005 is such a globular cluster, and its very existence has provided evidence to support the theory of galaxy evolution via mergers. Indeed, the stars in NGC 2005 have a chemical composition that is distinct from the stars in the LMC around it. This suggests that the LMC underwent a merger with another galaxy somewhere in its history. That other galaxy has long-since merged and otherwise dispersed, but NGC 2005 remains behind as an ancient witness to the long-past merger.
[Image Description: A globular cluster, appearing as a highly dense and numerous collection of shining stars. Some appear a bit larger and brighter than others, with the brightest having cross-shaped spikes around them. They are scattered mostly uniformly, but in the centre they crowd together more and more densely, and merge into a strong glow at the cluster’s core.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Niederhofer, L. Girardi; CC BY 4.0
This image shows LEDA 42160, a galaxy about 52 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The dwarf galaxy is one of many forcing its way through the comparatively dense gas in the Virgo cluster, a massive cluster of galaxies. The pressure exerted by this intergalactic gas, known as ram pressure, has dramatic effects on star formation in LEDA 42160, which are presently being studied using the Hubble Space Telescope.
LEDA 42160 falls into the category of ‘Magellanic spiral galaxy’, or type Sm for short, under the de Vaucouleurs galaxy classification system. Magellanic spiral galaxies can be further sub-categorised as barred (SBm), unbarred (SAm) and weakly barred (SABm), where a ‘bar’ is an elongated bar-shape at a galaxy’s core. Generally speaking, Magellanic spiral galaxies are dwarf galaxies with only one single spiral arm. They are named after their prototype, the Large Magellanic Cloud, which is an SBm galaxy. Magellanic spiral galaxies are an interesting example of how galaxy categorisation is actually more nuanced than simply ‘spiral’, ‘elliptical’ or ‘irregular’.
[Image Description: A distorted dwarf galaxy, obscured by dust and by bright outbursts caused by star formation, floats roughly in the centre. A few distant galaxies are visible in the background around it, many as little spirals, and also including a prominent elliptical galaxy. A bright star hangs above the galaxy in the foreground, marked by cross-shaped diffraction spikes.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Sun; CC BY 4.0
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has begun the study of one of the most renowned supernovae, SN 1987A (Supernova 1987A). Located 168,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, SN 1987A has been a target of intense observations at wavelengths ranging from gamma rays to radio for nearly 40 years, since its discovery in February of 1987. New observations by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) provide a crucial clue to our understanding of how a supernova develops over time to shape its remnant.
This image reveals a central structure like a keyhole. This center is packed with clumpy gas and dust ejected by the supernova explosion. The dust is so dense that even near-infrared light that Webb detects can’t penetrate it, shaping the dark “hole” in the keyhole.
A bright, equatorial ring surrounds the inner keyhole, forming a band around the waist that connects two faint arms of hourglass-shaped outer rings. The equatorial ring, formed from material ejected tens of thousands of years before the supernova explosion, contains bright hot spots, which appeared as the supernova's shock wave hit the ring. Now spots are found even exterior to the ring, with diffuse emission surrounding it. These are the locations of supernova shocks hitting more exterior material.
While these structures have been observed to varying degrees by NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes and Chandra X-ray Observatory, the unparalleled sensitivity and spatial resolution of Webb revealed a new feature in this supernova remnant – small crescent-like structures. These crescents are thought to be a part of the outer layers of gas shot out from the supernova explosion. Their brightness may be an indication of limb brightening, an optical phenomenon that results from viewing the expanding material in three dimensions. In other words, our viewing angle makes it appear that there is more material in these two crescents than there actually may be.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Matsuura (Cardiff University), R. Arendt (NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center & University of Maryland, Baltimore County), C. Fransson
#NASA #STScI #jwst #jameswebbspacetelescope #NASAGoddard #NASAMarshall #supernova
This is a showpiece of the southern skies, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a member of the Local Group, and a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, one rich in star forming nebulas and clusters. The LMC is cross between a dwarf irregular galaxy and a barred spiral. The nebulas along its bar and arms show as regions of magenta and cyan, from hydrogen and oxygen emission.
The bright cyan Tarantula Nebula, NGC 2070, is at left, with the NGC 2014/NGC 1935 area above it.
The field is 7.5 by 5º but still does not include all the parts of the LMC.
This is a stack of 15 x 4-minute exposures with the Sharpstar 61mm EDPH III refractor at f/4.4 and the filter-modified (by AstroGear.net) Canon R at ISO 800, on the Astro-Physics AP400 mount autoguided with the MGEN3 autoguider. No filter was employed in the light path.
Taken March 3, 2024 from the Mirrabook Cottage near Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia, on the first night of a successul two-week observing run down under.
The dwarf galaxies Small and Large Magellanic Clouds appear as smoke puffs coming out of a chimney in the South African Karoo while the Milky Way crosses the southern skies. South African Astronomical Observatory, Sutherland, South Africa, 20 Mar 2010.
© 2010 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
[ This long exposure image has a companion (relatively) short exposure "night sky" / "point star" image taken just 2 minutes after this photograph - see www.flickr.com/photos/momentsforzen/27092362483/ ]
[ There is also see an equivalent iPhone 6s Plus star trail photograph taken 3 months ago from this same location. The iPhone photograph was taken with an aperture of f/2.2 (fixed), 4.2mm focal length, 29mm equivalent focal length in 35mm format, and the image was 12MP (4032 x 3024 pixels). For the record, in comparison with the image here, there were some brighter stars in the field of view, and I could use a much longer exposure time (i.e., 2 hours versus 30 minutes) with the iPhone - see www.flickr.com/photos/momentsforzen/25515239202/ ]
Now, for this photograph ...
After researching and trialling all manner of actions and procedures that were new to me, I was ready to try a long exposure star trail exposure with my Hasselbald 500C/M camera body, Zeiss 40mm f/4 Distagon CF T* FLE lens, and CFV-50c digital back. Well, as "long" as the digital back would permit. This image was a 30 minute exposure, just shy of the 34 minute maximum exposure time.
Like most photographs that I have taken with this camera, the quality of the result surprised and staggered me. The trails were very sharp and the level of sensor noise was very low. Some dark vignette can be seen in the corners, but this is something that I find to be pleasing in most photographs. After 30 minutes, the trails were just long enough and dense enough to produce a pleasing image. And of course, all of this is despite the elevated ambient light levels of this inner-city location.
In contrast to the sky around the North Celestial Pole, there are few bright stars near the South Celestial Pole. In this field of view, the brightest star, with a Brightness Magnitude of 0.5, was Achernar, in the top left of the image. After that, there was Peacock (Brightness 1.91) in the top right of the image, and Atria (Brightness 1.92) towards the lower right corner of the image, just to the left of the corner of the building facade.
It would be possible to capture some brighter stars from this location sweeping around the pole. The Milky Way would be in the field of view between 18:00 and 03:00. At the time of this photograph, it was hidden from view on the right by the building.
The two smudges on the left hand side of the image are real astronomic objects, not just moisture clouds in the sky here on Earth! They are in fact the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two galaxies that are amongst the closest galaxies to our Milky Way Galaxy. The elongate, diffuse light cloud near the center left edge of the image, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), is in the region of the open cluster, the Tarantula Nebula (Caldwell Catalogue object C103). The nebula itself is too dim to be readily visible because it's Brightness Magnitude is 8.2. The other light cloud, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), that is offset towards the upper left from the center of the image, is adjacent to two unnamed globular clusters - Caldwell Catalogue objects C104 (unnamed) and C106 (47 Tucanae).
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Magellanic_Cloud
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Magellanic_Cloud
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldwell_catalogue
I wasn't sure how a long exposure would impact the camera battery. I started out on the photographic adventure this morning with a fresh battery, and this photograph was the 3rd of three 30 minute exposures. The first two were not "keepers" as it took a it of trial and error to discover appropriate exposure settings. The battery was still going well at the end of this 3rd 30 minute exposure as it had not reached the 20% warning level, indicating that it was good for at least 4 such exposures.
Barton, Australian Capital Territory, Australia.
Photography notes ...
The photograph was taken using the following hardware configuration ...
(Year of manufacture indicated in braces where known.)
- Hasselblad 500C/M body (1994).
- Hasselblad CFV-50c Digital Back for Hasselblad V mount camera.
- Hasselblad Focusing Screen for the CFV-50c digital back, with focussing prism and crop markings.
- Hasselblad 45 Degree Viewfinder PME-45 42297 (2001).
- Hasselblad Carl Zeiss lens - Distagon 40mm f4 CF T* FLE - Nr 7952446 - (1996).
- Hasselblad 93mm 1x HZ-0 Filter.
- Hasselblad 093/40 Hood/Filter holder for 40mm CF, CFE, CFi, CFE IF lenses.
I acquired the photograph (8272 x 6200 pixels) with an ISO of 100, exposure time of 30 minutes, and aperture of f/8.
In hindsight, an aperture of f/11 or f/16 would have been preferable since there were parts of the building facade that were overexposed.
Post-processing ...
Finder - Removed the CF card from the camera digital back and placed it in a Lexar 25-in-1 USB card reader. Then used Finder on my MacBook Air to download the raw image file (3FR extension) from the card.
Lightroom - Imported the 3FR image. Used the Map module to add the location details to the EXIF header. Then applied various adjustments in the Develop module, the essence of which is as follows (largely "borrowed" from my Develop Module Preset 20160522-001) ...
- White Balance (Temperature and Tint).
- Tone (Exposure, Contrast - Increased, Highlights and Shadows - Increased, Whites - Increased, Blacks - Decreased).
- Presence (Clarity - Increased, Vibrance - Increased, Saturation - Decreased).
- [HSL adjustments as required for selective color adjustments.]
- [Sharpening and Noise Reduction - Default values.]
- [Lens Corrections as required.]
- Dehaze - Increased.
- [Graduated and Radial filters as required for local adjustments.]
I then exported the image as a JPG file with 8272 x 6200 pixels from the Library module. The Develop Module settings were saved as Preset 20160613-001.
PhotoSync - Copied the JPEG file to my iPad Mini for viewing, enjoyment and posting to social media!
Astronomers have used Chandra tThis artist's illustration shows an enormous halo of hot gas (in blue) around the Milky Way galaxy. Also shown, to the lower left of the Milky Way, are the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, two small neighboring galaxies. The halo of gas is shown with a radius of about 300,000 light years, although it may extend significantly further.
Data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory was used to estimate [link to press release] that the mass of the halo is comparable to the mass of all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. If the size and mass of this gas halo is confirmed, it could be the solution to the "missing-baryon" problem for the Galaxy.
In a recent study, a team of five astronomers used data from Chandra, ESA's XMM-Newton, and Japan's Suzaku satellite to set limits on the temperature, extent and mass of the hot gas halo. Chandra observed eight bright X-ray sources located far beyond the Galaxy at distances of hundreds of millions of light years. The data revealed that X-rays from these distant sources are selectively absorbed by oxygen ions in the vicinity of the Galaxy. The nature of the absorption allowed the scientists to determine that the temperature of the absorbing halo is between 1 million and 2.5 million Kelvins.
Other studies have shown that the Milky Way and other galaxies are embedded in warm gas, with temperatures between 100,000 and one million degrees, and there have been indications that a hotter component with a temperature greater than a million degrees is also present. This new research provides evidence that the mass in the hot gas halo enveloping the Milky is much greater than that of the warm gas.
Read entire caption/view more images: www.chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2012/halo/
Image credit: Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; NASA/CXC/Ohio State/A Gupta et al.
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!
_____________________________________________
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 please visit: www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelin...
o find evidence that our Milky Way Galaxy is embedded in an enormous halo of hot gas that extends for hundreds of thousands of light years. This artist's illustration shows the halo of hot gas, in blue, around the Milky Way and two small neighboring galaxies. The mass of the halo is estimated to be comparable to the mass of all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. If the size and mass of this gas halo is confirmed, it could be the solution to the "missing-baryon" problem for the Galaxy.
Took an older picture I'd already processed from HST and tried overlaying the x-rays. This supernova remnant has a reddish/cooler x-ray rim with a bluer/hotter interior. Interestingly, the part brightest in visible light, which some call the firefox, is the dimmest part of the x-ray emitting nebula, but also apparently the hottest.
A Hubble-only view that I did a while back is here: flic.kr/p/MqXcQX
The upper left and lower right and a few other smaller places are missing data. I've put some fake data in there to make it less distracting, but it should be just noticeable if one looks closely.
Hubble proposals used:
High Resolution Imaging of Bubble and Superbubbles in HII Regions
Supernova Remnants in a Cloudy Interstellar Medium
Chandra data:
Red: .10-.70 keV
Green: .70-1.0 keV
Blue: 1.00-5.50 keV
(A single exposure from 2000, Obs ID 777)
Hubble data:
Orange: F673N WFPC2/WF
Cyan: F656N WFPC2/WF
Blue: F502N WFPC2/WF
North is up.
Editor's Note: Happy Valentine's Day, Flickr friends! I've been saving this beauty from 2007 for today...a double-ring ceremony in space. How romantic is that? :) Marshall Space Flight Center is having our "I Heart NASA" social media campaign. Do you heart NASA? Share your photos on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and use the hashtag #iheartnasa. If you love NASA, feel free to leave a comment here in Flickr. Have a great Valentine Friday!
February 24, 2007 marked the 20th anniversary of one of the most spectacular events observed by astronomers in modern times, Supernova 1987A. The destruction of a massive star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy, spawned detailed observations by many different telescopes, including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope. The outburst was visible to the naked eye, and is the brightest known supernova in almost 400 years.
This composite image shows the effects of a powerful shock wave moving away from the explosion. Bright spots of X-ray and optical emission arise where the shock collides with structures in the surrounding gas. These structures were carved out by the wind from the destroyed star. Hot-spots in the Hubble image (pink-white) now encircle Supernova 1987A like a necklace of incandescent diamonds. The Chandra data (blue-purple) reveals multimillion-degree gas at the location of the optical hot-spots. These data give valuable insight into the behavior of the doomed star in the years before it exploded.
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/PSU/S.Park & D.Burrows.; Optical: NASA/STScI/CfA/P.Challis
Original image: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2007/sn87a/
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!
_____________________________________________
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 please visit: www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelin...
In 1604, a new star appeared in the night sky that was much brighter than Jupiter and dimmed over several weeks. This event was witnessed by sky watchers including the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler. Centuries later, the debris from this exploded star is known as the Kepler supernova remnant. Astronomers have long studied the Kepler supernova remnant and tried to determine exactly what happened when the star exploded to create it. New analysis of a long observation from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is providing more clues. This analysis suggests that the supernova explosion was not only more powerful, but might have also occurred at a greater distance, than previously thought.
This image shows the Chandra data derived from more than eight days worth of observing time. The X-rays are shown in five colors from lower to higher energies: red, yellow, green, blue, and purple. These various X-ray slices were then combined with an optical image from the Digitized Sky Survey, showing stars in the field.
Previous analysis of this Chandra image has determined that the stellar explosion that created Kepler was what astronomers call a “Type Ia” supernova. This class of supernovas occurs when a white dwarf gains mass, either by pulling gas off a companion star or merging with another white dwarf, until it becomes unstable and is destroyed by a thermonuclear explosion.
Unlike other well-known Type Ia supernovas and their remnants, Kepler’s debris field is being strongly shaped by what it is running into. More specifically, most Type Ia supernova remnants are very symmetrical, but the Kepler remnant is asymmetrical with a bright arc of X-ray emission in its northern region. This indicates the expanding ball of debris from the supernova explosion is plowing into the gas and dust around the now-dead star.
The bright X-ray arc can be explained in two ways. In one model, the pre-supernova star and its companion were moving through the interstellar gas and losing mass at a significant rate via a wind, creating a bow shock wave similar to that of a boat moving through water. Another possibility is that the X-ray arc is caused by debris from the supernova expanding into an interstellar cloud of gradually increasing density.
The wind and bow shock model described above requires that the Kepler supernova remnant is located at a distance of more than 23,000 light years. In the latter alternative, the gas into which the remnant is expanding has higher density than average, and the distance of the remnant from the earth is between about 16,000 and 20,000 light years. Both alternatives give greater distances than the commonly used value of 13,000 light years.
In either model, the X-ray spectrum -- that is, the amount of X-rays produced at different energies -- reveals the presence of a large amount of iron, and indicates an explosion more energetic than the average Type Ia supernova. Additionally, to explain the observed X-ray spectrum in this model, a small cavity must have been cleared out around the star before it exploded. Such a cavity, which would have a diameter less than a tenth that of the remnant’s current size, might have been produced by a fast, dense outflow from the surface of the white dwarf before it exploded, as predicted by some models of Type Ia supernovas.
Evidence for an unusually powerful Type Ia supernova has previously been observed in another remnant with Chandra and an optical telescope. These results were independently verified by subsequent observations of light from the original supernova explosion that bounced off gas clouds, a phenomenon called light echoes. This other remnant is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy about 160,000 light years from Earth, making it much farther away than Kepler and therefore more difficult to study.
These results were published in the September 1st, 2012 edition of The Astrophysical Journal. The authors of this study are Daniel Patnaude from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, MA; Carles Badenes from University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, PA; Sangwook Park from the University of Texas at Arlington, TX, and Martin Laming from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC.
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/kepler/
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/D.Patnaude, Optical: DSS
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!
_____________________________________________
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 please visit: www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelin...
When a massive star runs out fuel, it collapses and explodes as a supernova. Although these explosions are extremely powerful, it is possible for a companion star to endure the blast. A team of astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes has found evidence for one of these survivors.
This hardy star is in a stellar explosion's debris field - also called its supernova remnant - located in an HII region called DEM L241. An HII (pronounced "H-two") region is created when the radiation from hot, young stars strips away the electrons from neutral hydrogen atoms (HI) to form clouds of ionized hydrogen (HII). This HII region is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small companion galaxy to the Milky Way.
A new composite image of DEM L241 contains Chandra data (purple) that outlines the supernova remnant. The remnant remains hot and therefore X-ray bright for thousands of years after the original explosion occurred. Also included in this image are optical data from the Magellanic Cloud Emission Line Survey (MCELS) taken from ground-based telescopes in Chile (yellow and cyan), which trace the HII emission produced by DEM L241. Additional optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey (white) are also included, showing stars in the field.
R. Davies, K. Elliott, and J. Meaburn, whose last initials were combined to give the object the first half of its name, first mapped DEM L241 in 1976. The recent data from Chandra revealed the presence of a point-like X-ray source at the same location as a young massive star within DEM L241's supernova remnant.
Astronomers can look at the details of the Chandra data to glean important clues about the nature of X-ray sources. For example, how bright the X-rays are, how they change over time, and how they are distributed across the range of energy that Chandra observes.
In this case, the data suggest that the point-like source is one component of a binary star system. In such a celestial pair, either a neutron star or black hole (formed when the star went supernova) is in orbit with a star much larger than our Sun. As they orbit one another, the dense neutron star or black hole pulls material away its companion star through the wind of particles that flows away from its surface. If this result is confirmed, DEM L241 would be only the third binary containing both a massive star and a neutron star or black hole ever found in the aftermath of a supernova.
Chandra's X-ray data also show that the inside of the supernova remnant is enriched in oxygen, neon and magnesium. This enrichment and the presence of the massive star imply that the star that exploded had a mass greater than 25 times, to perhaps up to 40 times, that of the Sun.
Optical observations with the South African Astronomical Observatory's 1.9-meter telescope show the velocity of the massive star is changing and that it orbits around the neutron star or black hole with a period of tens of days. A detailed measurement of the velocity variation of the massive companion star should provide a definitive test of whether or not the binary contains a black hole.
Indirect evidence already exists that other supernova remnants were formed by the collapse of a star to form a black hole. However, if the collapsed star in DEM L241 turns out to be a black hole, it would provide the strongest evidence yet for such a catastrophic event.
What does the future hold for this system? If the latest thinking is correct, the surviving massive star will be destroyed in a supernova explosion some millions of years from now. When it does, it may form a binary system containing two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole, or even a system with two black holes.
A paper describing these results is available online and was published in the November 10, 2012 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The authors are Fred Seward of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA; P. Charles from University of Southampton, UK; D. Foster from the South African Astronomical Observatory in Cape Town, South Africa; J. Dickel and P. Romero from University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM; Z. Edwards, M. Perry and R. Williams from Columbus State University in Columbus, GA.
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 in Cambridge, Mass., controls Chandra's science and flight operations.
Original caption/more images: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2014/deml241/
Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/F.Seward et al; Optical: NOAO/CTIO/MCELS, DSS
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!
_______________________________
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 please visit: www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelin...
The Milky Way night sky filled with stars, light cloud and a hint of the Southern Aurora in Blayney, Central West, NSW, Australia.
N103B is seen here glowing in nacreous colored x-rays from CXO overlaid upon its visible counterpart from HST glowing red in hydrogen and greenish oxygen emission.
Coincidentally, and wonderfully, a bright planetary nebula is glowing a greenish yellow hue to the lower right, seen against a reddish, larger gaseous emission nebula which surrounds the young double star cluster NGC 1850 that exists just outside the frame.
This is all happening within our small, neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. We are lucky to have the LMC as there are many neat things to see within it, but it is not so far away that they are too small to make out.
Hubble data from the following proposals were used to create the image:
A Search for Surviving Companions of Type Ia Supernovae in the Large Magellanic Cloud
N103B: A Type Ia Remnant with Circumstellar Interaction... Kepler's Older Cousin?
Chandra data:
Red: .10-.90 keV
Green: .90-1.20 keV
Blue: 1.20-10.0 keV
(All 12 of Willams's observations from 2018)
Hubble data:
40% Luminosity: WFC3/UVIS F657N
Red screen: WFC3/UVIS F656N
Cyan screen: WFC3/UVIS F502N
Red: WFC3/UVIS F814W
Green: WFC3/UVIS F555W
Blue: WFC3/UVIS F475W
North is up.
The area is rich in Integrated Flux Nebulae. A part of Gum Nebula is visible red near the left upper corner. Stars trailed near the left lower corner due to differential atmospheric refraction near the horizon.
Integrated Flux Nebulae are visible clearer in inverted frame.
Large Magellanic Cloud and Integrated Flux Nebulae Nearby with Sigma 85mmF1.4 Art December 2016 Inverted Version:
www.flickr.com/photos/hiroc/37527361541
The Magellanic Clouds are connected with stellar streams, the brightest parts of which are known as wing and tail of SMC. The MCs are also accompanied by long Hydrogen-I gas stream extending more than 100 degrees.
equipment: Sigma 40mmF1.4 Art and EOS 6D-SP4, modified by Seo-san on ZWO AM5 equatorial mount on the genuine tripod with counter weight 4.8kg, autoguided with Fujinon 1:2.8/75mm C-Mount Lens, ZWO ASI 120MM-mini, and PHD2 Guiding
exposure: 3 times x 900 seconds, 3 x 240 sec, 5 x 60, and 1 x 15 seconds at ISO 1,600 and f/3.2
site: 2,434m above sea level at lat. 24 39 52 south and long. 70 16 11 west near Cerro Armazones in Sierra Vicuña Mackenna in Coast Range of Chile
Ambient temperature was around 10 degrees Celsius or 34 degrees Fahrenheit. Wind was mild. Sky was dark, and SQML reached 21.83 at the night.
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC) at dawn above Yepun (Venus in Mapuche), the fourth VLT Unit Telescope. Paranal Observatory, Atacama Dessert, Chile, 25 Aug 09. © 2009 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
See the resulting video, cumulative video, meteor shot, Milky Way shot
This is the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and member of the Local Group of galaxies, framed in portrait orientartion to include all of the Cloud and some of the fainter outlying glow and surrounding stars of Mensa and Dorado.
The bright knot at left on the eastern side of the LMC is the Tarantula Nebula, NGC 2070, and its surrounding complex of other nebulas. The large nebula on the right or western end of the LMC is the NGC 1763 complex.
The LMC is officially classed as a barred spiral galaxy, and some of that form is apparent here, though it is rather asymetric, with an obvious arm sweeping up to the north and rich in nebulas, but only a weak arm visible below to the south.
The bright star at top is Beta Doradus, the second brightest star in Dorado the Swordfish or Goldfish. The other stars above the LMC belong to Dorado. The stars below the LMC belong to Mensa, named for Table Mountain in South Africa.
This is a stack of 13 x 2-minute exposures, with the RF135mm lens at f/2.2 and the Canon Ra at ISO 800, on the MSM Nomad tracker. The lens had an URTH Night broadband night filter on it to improve contrast somewhat. Taken on a partly cloudy night March 6, 2024 from Mirrabook Cottage, near Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia. Some frames were through thin clouds and I left those in the stack to add the natural star glows to bring out the brighter stars and their colours.
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has begun the study of one of the most renowned supernovae, SN 1987A (Supernova 1987A). Located 168,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, SN 1987A has been a target of intense observations at wavelengths ranging from gamma rays to radio for nearly 40 years, since its discovery in February of 1987. New observations by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) provide a crucial clue to our understanding of how a supernova develops over time to shape its remnant.
This image reveals a central structure like a keyhole. This center is packed with clumpy gas and dust ejected by the supernova explosion. The dust is so dense that even near-infrared light that Webb detects can’t penetrate it, shaping the dark “hole” in the keyhole.
A bright, equatorial ring surrounds the inner keyhole, forming a band around the waist that connects two faint arms of hourglass-shaped outer rings. The equatorial ring, formed from material ejected tens of thousands of years before the supernova explosion, contains bright hot spots, which appeared as the supernova’s shock wave hit the ring. Now spots are found even exterior to the ring, with diffuse emission surrounding it. These are the locations of supernova shocks hitting more exterior material.
In this image blue represents light at 1.5 microns (F150W), cyan 1.64 and 2.0 microns (F164N, F200W), yellow 3.23 microns (F323N), orange 4.05 microns (F405N), and red 4.44 microns (F444W).
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Matsuura (Cardiff University), R. Arendt (NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center & University of Maryland, Baltimore County), C. Fransson (Stockholm University), J. Larsson (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), A. Pagan (STScI)
Caldwell 103 is a treasure of the southern night sky. Also cataloged as NGC 2070 and often called the Tarantula Nebula or 30 Doradus, this chimerical structure is nestled in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. This Hubble image has caught the star-forming factory mid-frenzy, as it churns out stars at a furious pace. Individual members range from small, embryonic stars still shrouded in thick cocoons of gas and dust, to stellar behemoths doomed to live fast and die young in ferocious supernova explosions.
In the Tarantula Nebula, the massive stars are carving deep cavities in the surrounding material by unleashing a torrent of ultraviolet light, which is winnowing away at the enveloping hydrogen gas cloud in which the stars were born. Besides sculpting the gaseous terrain, the brilliant stars may be triggering a new generation of offspring. When the ultraviolet radiation hits dense walls of gas, it creates shocks, which may generate a new wave of star birth. In fact, scientists believe that a shock wave from a nearby supernova may have caused the cloud of gas and dust that the Sun formed within to collapse, leading to the creation of our solar system. If correct, that means we owe our lives to the violent death of a massive neighboring star.
This 2011 image is one of the largest mosaics ever assembled from Hubble exposures and includes observations taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys. The colors trace different elements in the hot gas that dominates the image, with red signifying hydrogen and blue representing oxygen.
The Tarantula Nebula was first recorded by astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille in 1751. Though it is located a staggering 170,000 light-years away, the Tarantula Nebula has a magnitude of 4, making it visible to the unaided eye and a spectacular target for binoculars. Through medium and large telescopes, the nebula’s spider-like structure becomes apparent. To get the best view of the Tarantula, visit a dark-sky site in the Southern Hemisphere around the beginning of the year and look for it within the bounds of the Large Magellanic Cloud, located in the constellation Dorado.
For more information about Hubble’s observations of Caldwell 103, see:
hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2012/news-2012-01.html
spacetelescope.org/news/heic1402/
hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/1999/news-1999-12.h...
www.nasa.gov/image-feature/Goddard/2017/hubbles-bubbles-i...
hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2016/news-2016-10.html
spacetelescope.org/images/potw1441a/
spacetelescope.org/images/potw1232a/
spacetelescope.org/news/heic1105/
hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2010/news-2010-14.html
spacetelescope.org/news/heic0416/
hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/1999/news-1999-33.html
Credit: NASA, ESA, D. Lennon and E. Sabbi (ESA/STScI), J. Anderson, S. E. de Mink, R. van der Marel, T. Sohn, and N. Walborn (STScI), N. Bastian (Excellence Cluster, Munich), L. Bedin (INAF, Padua), E. Bressert (ESO), P. Crowther (University of Sheffield), A. de Koter (University of Amsterdam), C. Evans (UKATC/STFC, Edinburgh), A. Herrero (IAC, Tenerife), N. Langer (AifA, Bonn), I. Platais (JHU), and H. Sana (University of Amsterdam)
For Hubble's Caldwell catalog website and information on how to find these objects in the night sky, visit:
The Large Magellanic Cloud, is 8 hours of integration in HaLRGB with Takahashi FSQ-106ED telescope 1067382 f 3/6, QHY 600M Pro camera, of which in Ha 12x600 seconds, in L 12x600 seconds, in R 12x600 seconds, in G 12x600 seconds, in B 12x600 seconds, processing with Pixinsight and Photoshop. all data and shots were captured with Telescope Live. The Large Magellanic Cloud Large Magellanic Cloud () is a dwarf galaxy, probably a satellite of the Milky Way, and the larger of the two Magellanic Clouds. Due to its relatively short distance of only 48 kpc (160,000 al), it is the closest galaxy to the Milky Way after the Canis Major (12.9 kpc (42,000 al)) and Sagittarius (16 kpc (52,000 al)), the latter located on the opposite side of the galactic center from the solar system.
Description: Chandra's X-ray image of the supernova remnant DEM L71 revealed a ten million-degree hot inner cloud (aqua) of glowing iron and silicon surrounded by an outer ring of 5 million-degree gas. An analysis of the Chandra data identified the inner cloud as the remains of a white dwarf star that exploded. The white dwarf pulled matter
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: 2003
Persistent URL: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/deml71/
Repository: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Gift line: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Rutgers/J.Hughes
Accession number: deml71_xray
The diminishing glow of the setting Moon increases the contrast of the disk of our galaxy, The Milky Way, in this 30-sec exposure. Similar to a sunset, scattering in the atmosphere makes the moonlight redder as seen here not only on the Moon itself but on the light reflected off the Very Large Telescope (VLT). Also visible, Jupiter and the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds (SMC and LMC). Paranal Observatory, Atacama Desert, Chile.
© 2009 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
See also:
All-sky video, Cumulative video, Milky Way still, 35-exp stack, VLT at Dawn,
My photo today is another from my vault of "I'll get to them someday" shots, captured in December of 2018 near Bodalla, Australia. I remember this being a night when I burned up more time trying to outrun clouds than shooting images of the sky. My efforts weren't all in vain, though. The thin layer of airborne moisture that wafted into the area on my arrival served to enhance the colours of the stars.
To the left of the largest tree, I caught the familiar shape of the Southern Cross. Below and a little to the right, the two "pointers", Alpha and Beta Centauri, are showing more like glowing blobs than the usual pinpricks of light that stars seem to be when we look at the night sky. The Large Magellanic Cloud–the only cloud that I had hoped to see through my viewfinder–is conspicuous in the top right-hand corner of my shot.
The photo is a single-frame image that I took with my Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4 using an exposure time of 15 seconds @ ISO 6400.
While choosing a photo to post today, I spent possibly too much time deciding if I should select this one. I had a feeling that I’d featured these fluffy, floating orbs–the Magellanic Clouds–too many times throughout 2020, and didn’t want to bore anyone. After a quick flick through my published images for the year, I found that this will be only the third time since January that I’ve brought them to you, and I hope that you’ll enjoy another look.
Despite their names, you’re not looking at clouds but two dwarf galaxies that are travelling through space with our Milky Way galaxy, at the relatively close distances of 163,000 light-years and 206,000 light-years from us, respectively. My photo managed to capture them both in the same frame, but that gap between the two irregular dwarf galaxies has been measured at around 75,000 light-years. Southern Hemisphere observers–and some from the lower northern latitudes–can see the Clouds in the night sky, even in light-polluted cities such as the one I live in, Sydney, Australia.
To create this photo, I shot eleven individual images of this part of the sky, then combined (stacked) those in software so that I could reduce the amount of digital signal noise in the scene. For each one of the eleven frames, I used a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Yongnuo 50mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.0 using an exposure time of 8.0 seconds @ ISO 6400.
One of my goals on our recent trip to New Zealand was to see and photograph the starry southern sky. We were there for three weeks, and only one night had a clear sky. Fortunately, we were staying in the small town of Methven.
Around 9 pm I gathered my camera and tripod and walked out of town, past the last street light, and out into a field.
Sitting on the damp ground, I spent the next hour shooting the stars. I was using my little Sony RX100-iii, a point and shoot camera never intended for star photography. I made ten images of each patch of the sky so I could stack and median-filter them to reduce noise when I got home.
The Milky Way was directly above, in a band that stretched from the southeast horizon to the northwest. Lying on my back with my feet pointed to the southwest, it appeared as a straight line from horizon to horizon.
I used StarryLandscapeStacker to merge the stacks of each segment and then used PTGui Pro to stitch them together. This was not very successful, and I had to make some manual adjustments in Photoshop. As star shots go, what I got is not that great. But considering the equipment, it came out about as well as possible.
On the left (southern) side, you can see the Southern Cross (maybe, I'm not sure). The large Magellanic Cloud is visible on the bottom of the image. and On the right, in the far north, is the Orion constellation, upside down from the way I usually see it in North America.
Tomorrow I will post another Milky Way shot that I took a few days ago in New Mexico, quite different from this one.
A supernova remnant in the Large Magellanic Cloud from Hubble and Chandra (visible and x-ray light).
Hubble only version: flic.kr/p/2h7ykXj
Chandra only version: flic.kr/p/2h7wtqw
Chandra data:
Violet / Magenta overlay: ACIS .30-2.00 keV
Hubble data:
Red Screen & 50% Luminosity: WFC3/UVIS F565N
Red: WFC3/UVIS F814W
Green: WFC3/UVIS F555W
Blue: WFC3/UVIS F475W
North is 8.55° counter-clockwise from up.
The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has begun the study of one of the most renowned supernovae, SN 1987A (Supernova 1987A). Located 168,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, SN 1987A has been a target of intense observations at wavelengths ranging from gamma rays to radio for nearly 40 years, since its discovery in February of 1987. New observations by Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) provide a crucial clue to our understanding of how a supernova develops over time to shape its remnant.
This image reveals a central structure like a keyhole. This center is packed with clumpy gas and dust ejected by the supernova explosion. The dust is so dense that even near-infrared light that Webb detects can’t penetrate it, shaping the dark “hole” in the keyhole.
A bright, equatorial ring surrounds the inner keyhole, forming a band around the waist that connects two faint arms of hourglass-shaped outer rings. The equatorial ring, formed from material ejected tens of thousands of years before the supernova explosion, contains bright hot spots, which appeared as the supernova’s shock wave hit the ring. Now spots are found even exterior to the ring, with diffuse emission surrounding it. These are the locations of supernova shocks hitting more exterior material.
In this image blue represents light at 1.5 microns (F150W), cyan 1.64 and 2.0 microns (F164N, F200W), yellow 3.23 microns (F323N), orange 4.05 microns (F405N), and red 4.44 microns (F444W).
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Matsuura (Cardiff University), R. Arendt (NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center & University of Maryland, Baltimore County), C. Fransson (Stockholm University), J. Larsson (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), A. Pagan (STScI)