View allAll Photos Tagged SmallMagellanicCloud
Another Milky Way shot from Australia - a trip across the Simpson Desert in June last year. Note how the Milky Way is "upside down" compared to this November 2017 shot of the Gibson Steps.
Our campsite was just north of the QAA Line on the border between Queensland and the Northern Territory. The moon was just setting but there was still enough fading light to show up the foreground. The Small Magellanic Cloud is clearly visible in the centre while the Large Magellanic Cloud is a bit fuzzier as it's just above the horizon.
EXIF: 14mm; f/2.8; 30 secs; ISO3200.
35mm
53 x 10 seconds
ISO 5000
f/1.8
Stitched in MS ICE
This is a 53 image panorama taken at Harvey Dam, approximately 125km (100mi) south of Perth in Western Australia. The Large & Small Magellanic Clouds can be see near the horizon just right of centre. The light pollution is coming from the Worsley Alumina Refinery approximately 15km away.
Another shot on a moonless night from the bottom of the Gibson Steps.
The seastacks Gog and Magog are on the far right, the core of the Milky Way is peering above the horizon on the left and Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are dead centre. The really bright start just right of centre is Canopus. It's only 310 light years away, has a radius 71 times that of the Sun and shines 10,000 times as brightly.
The brightest star Sirius is on the far right and, oh yeah, the photo is a stitch of 9 shots using Microsoft ICE.
+LMC, SMC
Wyberba, Queensland, Australia
Nikon D810A 14mm F2.8 ISO3200 30sec
SAMYANG 14mm F2.8 ED AS IF UMC
Here in Australia, we recognise our seasons as commencing on the first day of a calendar quarter. Winter begins on the first day of June. Spring, the first of September. With today being the second of December, we’ve already had one full day of summer pass by. That means it is six months since I was shivering through a winter night, shooting nightscape images using these silos in the foreground. It certainly doesn’t feel like it was that long ago!
With the Milky Way’s galactic core now lost in the brightness of the evening twilight–Milky Way season is over–you will likely see more posts from me and other nightscape photographers featuring star-trails and deep-sky objects.
I had planned to shoot at least two hours worth of star-trails at the silos last night, but a very thick fog floated in and put an end to that. The trails I did get were long enough to make a good image from, and I even achieved a result I’d set out to get, which was some trails showing between the silos and through the holes in the perishing roof. There is a fog-piercing light a few hundred metres along the road from the silos, and it provided an eerie glow to back-light the scene.
To create this final image I shot 123 single-frame photos in 55 minutes. I captured each of those frames with a Canon EOS 6D camera, fitted with a Samyang 14mm XP lens @ f/2.8, exposed for 25 seconds @ ISO 800.
Equipment: D810A+Sigma 40art+Sky memo rs(unguide)
Parameter: F2.8, ISO800, 300s*1 (4-frame mosaic)
Time: 2019/02/05 03:30
Place: York, Western Australia, Australia
Author: 陳麒瑞、王派鏹
The Total integration time is 20 minutes. (four-frame mosaic)
Here is 0.5x reduced versions.
Here is another collage I made, this evening. Starting from the Top left is the Northern Pleiades, the top right is the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Middle photo is Orion's Nebula, the bottom left is the Southern Pleiades and the bottom right is the Small Magellanic cloud with the globular cluster called the 47 Tuc. The 47 tuc is the bright object just off to the bottom right of the small Magellanic cloud.
To get a better view, you may need to zoom in a little.
This new image showcases NGC 346, a dazzling young star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The Small Magellanic Cloud is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located 200 000 light-years away in the constellation Tucana. The Small Magellanic Cloud is less rich in elements heavier than helium — what astronomers call metals — than the Milky Way. This makes conditions in the galaxy similar to what existed in the early universe.
Although several images of NGC 346 have been released previously, this view includes new data and is the first to combine Hubble observations made at infrared, optical, and ultraviolet wavelengths into an intricately detailed view of this vibrant star-forming factory.
NGC 346 is home to more than 2500 newborn stars. The cluster’s most massive stars, which are many times more massive than our Sun, blaze with an intense blue light in this image. The glowing pink nebula and snakelike dark clouds are the remnant of the birthsite of the stars in the cluster.
The inhabitants of this cluster are stellar sculptors, carving out a bubble from the nebula. NGC 346’s hot, massive stars produce intense radiation and fierce stellar winds that pummel the billowing gas of their birthplace and begin to disperse the surrounding nebula.
The nebula, named N66, is the brightest example of an H II (pronounced ‘H-two’) region in the Small Magellanic Cloud. H II regions are set aglow by ultraviolet light from hot young stars like those in NGC 346. The presence of the brilliant nebula indicates the young age of the star cluster, as an H II region shines only as long as the stars that power it — a mere few million years for the massive stars pictured here.
[Image description: A star cluster within a nebula. The background is filled with thin, pale blue clouds. Parts are thicker and pinker in colour. The cluster is made up of bright blue stars that illuminate the nebula around them. Large arcs of dense dust curve around, before and behind the clustered stars, pressed together by the stars’ radiation. Behind the clouds of the nebula can be seen large numbers of orange stars.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Nota, P. Massey, E. Sabbi, C. Murray, M. Zamani (ESA/Hubble); CC BY 4.0
The beautiful country night sky filled with stars and the Small Magellanic Cloud in Blayney, Central West, NSW, Australia.
Fifty [stacked] 30-sec exposures spanning approx. 25 min and showing Earth's rotation around the South Celestial Pole (SCP). Notice the meteor passing near the SCP and above Yepun (Venus in Mapuche), the fourth VLT Unit Telescope. The stacked image was then combined with the first frame in the sequence to produce the SCP-centered gradient effect. Photographed from the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) in Cerro Paranal, Chile.
© 2009 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
See the resulting video, cumulative video, Milky Way shot, Magellanic Clouds shot
The Small Magellanic Cloud (NGC 292) is a companion satellite galaxy of our Milkyway visible from the southern hemisphere, located approximately 203,700 LY away.
Taken through a 8" SCT at f1.9 with a Hyperstar reducer using a QHY268M camera, in RGB natural colour, with added H-Alpha & OIII narrowband signal to emphasize the fainter, more subtle, nebulosity.
The total integration time for this photo was only 9 hours and 55 minutes.
Small Magellanic Cloud in Ha and OIII Narrowband
For a ”Northern Lad” (in its broadest sense) seeing the SMC (visible in the Southern Hemisphere) is a wonderful new experience. This rendition using only Hydrogen alpha and Oxygen III emission data shows a myriad of structures - Bubbles of hydrogen gas (red/orange) sometimes filled with wisps of oxygen (blue) all driven by the intense radiation of newly forming stars. Massive tendrils that mark the remains of one Supernova after another … awe inspiring indeed. The massive galactic star field has been heavily reduced (in intensity) to enable the narrowband emission data to be more visible.
The data was collected on two wonderful visits to the Hakos Guestfarm, Namibia.
Celestron RASA 11
10 Micron GM1000 HPS
Moravian C1X 61000-M
The image is a three panel mosaic.
Nikon d810a
50mm
ISO 3200
f/3.2
Foreground: 6 x 15 seconds
Sky: 25 x 30 seconds
H-Alpha: 8 x 60 seconds
iOptron SkyTracker
This is a 39 shot panorama of the Milky Way rising above a lone tree on a farm at Contine, 1.5 hours south east of Perth in Western Australia.
Prominent in this image are the Large & Small Magellanic Clouds to the right, small satellite galaxies of our own Milky Way. Just right of centre at the very top is the pink coloured Carina Nebula while just below that is the dark CoalSack Nebula with Crux (Southern Cross) to its immediate left.
I used an h-alpha filter to highlight the various red coloured hydrogen alpha emitting regions, most prominent in and around the core area on the left.
In general, artificial light is not the friend of astronomers and astrophotographers. When it gets in the way of our observing or our photography, we refer to it as “light pollution”, a name that doesn’t have any hint of positivity at all. For this photo, though, I used artificial light in the form of my LED Lenser headlamp/torch to make some inner light seem to beam and burn out from the windows of this little church. Of course, the celestial lights above the church are the reason I was at this spot taking photos, but I didn’t want to pass up the chance to give this old house of worship some inner light to brighten the scene. The two Magellanic Cloud galaxies were too lovely to pass up and I think they add much to this photo.
Although I could have captured this scene with a single image, I used nine shots from a 65-frame panorama that I was creating on the night. I photographed each of those nine images with a Canon EOS 6D camera, a Rokinon 24mm lens @ f/2.4, using a 15-second exposure @ ISO 6400.
This frames the entire Small Magellanic Cloud, a member of the Local Group of galaxies and a companion of our Milky Way Galaxy.
While not as richly endowed with nebulas and clusters as its nearby companion, the Large Magellanic Cloud, the SMC is still a wonderful region to explore. However, the two most notable objects in this scene do not belong to the SMC, but are closer objects that just happen to lie near it in the sky in the constellation of Tucana. At right is the spectacular globular cluster NGC 104 or 47 Tucanae, perhaps the finest globular in the sky. At top is what is dubbed as the "Mini 47 Tuc," or NGC 362, as through a telescope it looks like a smaller version of 47 Tuc, with a similar compressed core. Above and below 47 Tuc, respectively, is the small globular NGC 121 and large open cluster Kron 3.
This portrait was taken with the aid of a dual-narrowband filter to emphasize the red and cyan nebulas embedded in the main body of the SMC but also outlying such as at left.
The brightest and largest cyan nebula in the SMC is NGC 362, with the large star cluster NGC 395 to the left but here obscured by a cyan nebula. The smaller star cluster NGC 330 lies below NGC 346. The reddish nebula below and left of the main region of the SMC is NGC 456. Farther out is the odd NGC 602 with a blue appendage to it. In between is a round nebula not labeled on charts I had. Indeed the various atlases I consulted differed in the identities of the objects. At the lower southern end of the SMC is a confusion of small nebulas: NGC 294, 267, 261, 241, 248.
The field is 7.5 by 5º.
This is a blend of: a stack of 8 x 10-minute exposures at ISO 3200 through an IDAS NBZ narrowband fiter (that passes just H-alpha and Oxygen III wavelengths) and a stack of 12 x 5 minute unfiltered exposures at ISO 800, all with the Sharpstar 61mm EDPH III refractor at f/4.4 and the filter-modified (by AstroGear.net) Canon R, on the Astro-Physics AP400 mount autoguided with the MGEN3 autoguider.
Taken March 5, 2024 from the Mirrabook Cottage near Coonabarabran, NSW, Australia, during a successful two-week observing run down under.
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
Since antiquity, wreaths have symbolized the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It is fitting then that one of the best places for astronomers to learn more about the stellar lifecycle resembles a giant holiday wreath itself.
The star cluster NGC 602 lies on the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, which is one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way, about 200,000 light-years from Earth. The stars in NGC 602 have fewer heavier elements compared to the Sun and most of the rest of the galaxy. Instead, the conditions within NGC 602 mimic those for stars found billions of years ago when the universe was much younger.
This new image combines data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory with a previously released image from the agency's James Webb Space Telescope. The dark ring-like outline of the wreath seen in Webb data (represented as orange, yellow, green, and blue) is made up of dense clouds of filled dust.
Meanwhile, X-rays from Chandra (red) show young, massive stars that are illuminating the wreath, sending high-energy light into interstellar space. These X-rays are powered by winds flowing from the young, massive stars that are sprinkled throughout the cluster. The extended cloud in the Chandra data likely comes from the overlapping X-ray glow of thousands of young, low-mass stars in the cluster.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC; Infrared: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Zeilder, E.Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and K. Arcand
#NASAMarshall #NASA #astrophysics #NASAChandra #NASA #JWST #NASAWebb #star #starcluster #SmallMagellanicCloud
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 Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC, respectively) are two dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way. This image shows the stellar density of the satellite galaxies as seen by Gaia in its Early Data Release 3, which was made public on 3 December 2020. It is composed of red, green and blue layers, which trace mostly the older, intermediate age, and younger stars respectively.
Astronomers place stars into categories that are often named for their colour and appearance.
In this image, the red layer contains evolved stars that compose the Red Giant Branch and Red Clump stars. The green layer contains Main Sequence stars of mixed ages of up to two billion years. The blue layer contains stars younger than 400 million years, Asymptotic Giant Branch stars, and RR-Lyrae and classical Cepheid variable stars.
The brightnesses used in this image are based on a logarithmic scale to enhance low surface density regions in the galaxies, for example the outer spiral arm in the LMC visible in the upper left.
The density of younger stars has been artificially enhanced with respect to the other evolutionary phases to make them more clearly visible. This shows that younger stars mostly trace the inner spiral structure of the LMC, and the ‘bridge’ of stars between the two galaxies. Finally, intermediate age and older stars trace the LMC bar, spiral arms, and outer halo, as well as the SMC outer halo.
Credits: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO. Acknowledgement: L. Chemin; X. Luri et al (2020)
The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), or Nubecula Minor, is a dwarf irregular satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
SMC has a diameter of about 7,000 light-years and has a total mass of approximately 7 billion solar masses.
The average apparent diameter is about 4.2° and thus covers an area of about 70 times the Moon's. The SMC forms a pair with the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC),
Its distance is 203,700 light-years (62.44kpc).
Composite data mosaic.
Taken with a Sony Cybershot DSC-RX1R Full Frame camera.
NOTE
The glow on the horizon is from a nearby mine, which has subsequently closed.
LINK
Other images from this series:
1. www.flickr.com/photos/jbrimacombe/51199386058/
2. www.flickr.com/photos/jbrimacombe/51198465367/
3. www.flickr.com/photos/jbrimacombe/51199384178/
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.
An open cluster of stars shines through misty, cocoon-like gas clouds in this Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 460.
NGC 460 is located in a region of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way. This particular region contains a number of young star clusters and nebulae of different sizes - all likely related to each other. The clouds of gas and dust can give rise to stars as portions of them collapse, and radiation and stellar winds from those hot, young bright stars in turn shape and compress the clouds, triggering new waves of star formation. The hydrogen clouds are ionized by the radiation of nearby stars, causing them to glow.
The NGC 460 star cluster resides in one of the youngest parts of this interconnected complex of stellar clusters and nebulae, which is also home to a number of O-type stars: the brightest, hottest and most massive of the normal, hydrogen-burning stars (called main-sequence stars) like our Sun. O-type stars are rare - out of more than 4 billion stars in the Milky Way, only about 20,000 are estimated to be O-type stars. The area that holds NGC 460, known as N83, may have been created when two hydrogen clouds in the region collided with one another, creating several O-type stars and nebulae.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and C. Lindberg (The Johns Hopkins University); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #DwarfGalaxy #StarCluster #SmallMagellanicCloud #nebula
Taken between 10th and 16th of November 2016, from my backyard in Hastings, Victoria. RGB data taken from Heathcote, Victoria.
My most difficult narrowband/RGB image to date, the processing was a nightmare due to the low number of OIII subs caused by Melbourne's nasty intermittent cloudy weather.
Unlike most other imagers, I prefer to combine the RGB star data more dominantly, to keep the image more 'natural' to my eyes. So the process of combining the RGB and NB data is certainly unconventional! I hope you like it :-)
For the palette, I mapped Ha to Red, 50/50 of Ha and OIII to green and OIII to Blue. Processed in Pixinsight, Straton, Photoshop, Lightroom and for versions 1-5, Startools. Quite a few attempts and iterations for this image!
Taken with the ZWO ASI 1600-mm cooled astro camera, at a gain of 75 and offset 14. -20c temp.
Using Astrodon 3nm Ha and OIII filters, as well as their Series II LRGB filters.
The astrograph/telescope used was the Takahashi E-130D, and the mount was the Software Bisque MyT.
Data acquisition details are:
Ha: 19 exposures of 10 minutes each
OIII: 9 exposures of 10 minutes each
Luminance: 180 exposures of 10 secs each
RGB- For each filter, 60 exposures of 10 secs each.
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,
As part of ESA/Hubble’s 35th anniversary celebrations, the European Space Agency (ESA) is sharing a new image series revisiting stunning, previously released Hubble targets with the addition of the latest Hubble data and new processing techniques.
This new image showcases the dazzling young star cluster NGC 346. Although both the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble have released images of NGC 346 previously, this image includes new data and is the first to combine Hubble observations made at infrared, optical, and ultraviolet wavelengths into an intricately detailed view of this vibrant star-forming factory.
This dazzling NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the young star cluster NGC 346.
NGC 346 is in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way that lies 200,000 light-years away in the constellation Tucana. The Small Magellanic Cloud is less rich in elements heavier than helium — what astronomers call metals — than the Milky Way. This makes conditions in the galaxy similar to what existed in the early universe.
NGC 346 is home to more than 2,500 newborn stars. The cluster’s most massive stars, which are many times more massive than our Sun, blaze with an intense blue light in this image. The glowing pink nebula and snakelike dark clouds are sculpted by the luminous stars in the cluster.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Nota, P. Massey, E. Sabbi, C. Murray, M. Zamani (ESA/Hubble)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #starcluster #SmallMagellanicCloud
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!
_____________________________________________
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...
Say hello to one of the Milky Way’s neighbors! This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features a scene from one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is a dwarf galaxy located about 200,000 light-years away. Most of the galaxy resides in the constellation Tucana, but a small section crosses over into the neighboring constellation Hydrus.
Thanks to its proximity, the SMC is one of only a few galaxies that are visible from Earth without the help of a telescope or binoculars. For viewers in the southern hemisphere and some latitudes in the northern hemisphere, the SMC resembles a piece of the Milky Way that has broken off, though in reality it’s much farther away than any part of our own galaxy.
Credit: NASA, ESA and M. West (Lowell Observatory); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy #SmallMagellanicCloud
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.
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.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope just solved a conundrum by proving a controversial finding made with the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope more than 20 years ago.
In 2003, Hubble provided evidence of a massive planet around a very old star, almost as old as the universe. Such stars possess only small amounts of heavier elements that are the building blocks of planets. This implied that some planet formation happened when our universe was very young, and those planets had time to form and grow big inside their primordial disks, even bigger than Jupiter. But how? This was puzzling.
To answer this question, researchers used Webb to study stars in a nearby galaxy that, much like the early universe, lacks large amounts of heavy elements. They found that not only do some stars there have planet-forming disks, but that those disks are longer-lived than those seen around young stars in our Milky Way galaxy.
This is a James Webb Space Telescope image of NGC 346, a massive star cluster in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that is one of the Milky Way's nearest neighbors. With its relative lack of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, the NGC 346 cluster serves as a nearby proxy for studying stellar environments with similar conditions in the early, distant universe. Ten, small, yellow circles overlaid on the image indicate the positions of the ten stars surveyed in this study.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Olivia C. Jones (UK ATC), Guido De Marchi (ESTEC), Margaret Meixner (USRA)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #JWST #NASAWebb #NASAGoddard #galaxy
Large and Small Magellanic Clouds in the busy night sky filled with stars and satellites over Blayney, Central West, NSW, Australia.
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
927 thirty-sec [stacked] all-sky exposures spanning approx. 9.5 hours showing the Earth's rotation. The setting Moon illuminates the Very Large Telescope (VLT) during the evening hours. The South Celestial Pole (SCP) is clearly visible at the top of the image. Notice the lack of a bright star near the SCP that could serve as a counterpart to the Polaris. Paranal Observatory, Atacama Desert, Chile, 24-25 Aug 09. © 2009 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
See also:
All-sky video, Cumulative video, Milky Way still, 35-exp stack, Moonset, VLT at Dawn
30 sec, ISO 4000 | Nikon D3s + 14-24mm f/2.8G
1-m Yale Telescope | Lunar Scintillometer | Curtis-Schmidt Telescope
Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Chile, 13 April 2011
© 2011 José Francisco Salgado, PhD
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
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.
Roughly 210,000 light-years away, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of our Milky Way galaxy’s closest neighbors. In fact, this small galaxy is one of the Milky Way’s “satellite” galaxies, which orbit our home spiral galaxy.
Nested within the SMC is this spectacular star cluster, known as NGC 346. Its hot stars unleash a torrent of radiation and energetic outflows, which erode the denser portions of gas and dust in the surrounding nebula, N66. Dozens of hot, blue, and high-mass stars shine within NGC 346, and astronomers believe this cluster contains more than half of the known high-mass stars in the whole SMC.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and C. Murray (Space Telescope Science Institute); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)
#NASAMarshall #NASA #astrophysics #NASA #galaxy #ESA #NASAGoddard #SmallMagellanicCloud #StarCluster
Got into a bit of a fake / joke argument with Cory Schmitz over on Twitter about the Small Magellenic Cloud being boring, and realized I didn't have much imagery from the SMC! This addition will make two. The SMC isn't necessarily boring, but it is, well, smaller, and has perhaps fewer things going on in it. But those things are still just as wonderful to look at! This is an active star-forming region with central a bright, blueish star cluster, and also an overlapping, older, redder cluster near the top. The cluster near the top looks kind of like one of those more diffuse globular clusters, but I looked around and couldn't find anyone calling it that. Anyway, it's surely one of the most beautiful vistas in our cosmic neighborhood.
Wispy, cloud-like structures are always associated with star formation, and here all the soft pinks and blues are gas giving off its own glow after getting energized by the very bright, newly formed stars. Dark clouds are places where dust is thick enough that light from any glowing gas and stars is being blocked. Sometimes the dust likes to blend into the background darkness of the sky, and we can't even tell it's there in visible wavelengths.
This particular dataset is very interesting to work with because there is a 2004 set and a 2015 set, giving an 11 year difference to compare the two. It's really fun to blink the two back and forth and find all the stars with high proper motions, a few variable stars, and even an apparent dust-enshrouded star either brightening, or becoming exposed out of its dusty envelope. Not sure what's going on there, but I did make an animation about it that I posted over at Twitter.
One thing I gotta do here is pay tribute to this earlier version of the image, processed years before I ever started doing this:
hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2005/news-2005-35.html
It's a pretty challenging set of filters to work with, and it's very easy to get some very out of balance colors out of it. So, kudos to those past and future who attempt this one.
Data from the following proposals were used to create this image:
Current star formation in young, compact clusters in the Small Magellanic Cloud
A 3D view of massive cluster formation in the SMC
50% Luminosity layer: ACS/WFC F685N
Red screen: ACS/WFC F685N
Red: ACS/WFC F814W
Green: Pseudo
Blue: ACS/WFC F555W
North is 2.5° clockwise from up.
Only a minute or two before I took this photo, the moon had started to make its appearance for the night. Although not yet clear of the horizon, the Earth’s silvery companion-in-space was already beginning to brighten the sky with its light.
The Milky Way’s core was very low on the southwestern horizon when I shot this scene. I had quite a few shots of that part of the sky already “in the can”, so opted to snap off a few frames with the Magellanic Clouds featured over this old stone church. The stones are old, for sure, with locals having completed the building in 1859. I but I think I’m right in guessing, though, that the plastic water tank and corrugated metal roof might not be of the same vintage as the bulk of the structure.
This photo is a single-frame image that I captured using a Canon EOS 6D Mk II camera, a Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 lens @ f/2.4, using an exposure time of 13 seconds @ ISO 6400.