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A spectacular head-on collision between two galaxies, known as Arp 143, has fueled the unusual triangular-shaped star-formation frenzy as captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
The interacting galaxy duo Arp 143 contains the distorted, star-forming spiral galaxy NGC 2445, at right, along with its less flashy companion, NGC 2444, at left. Their frenzied collision takes place against the tapestry of distant galaxies, of which some can be seen through the interacting pair.
Astronomers suggest that the two galaxies passed through each other, igniting the uniquely shaped firestorm of star formation in NGC 2445, where thousands of stars are bursting into life. This galaxy is awash with new stars because it is rich in gas, the raw material from which stars are made. However, it hasn’t yet escaped the gravitational clutches of its partner at left. The pair is waging a cosmic tug-of-war, which NGC 2444 appears to be winning. That galaxy has pulled gas from NGC 2445, forming the oddball triangle of newly minted stars.
NGC 2444 is also responsible for yanking strands of gas from its partner, stoking the streamers of young, blue stars that appear to form a bridge between the two galaxies. These streamers are among the first in what appears to be a wave of star formation that started on the galaxy’s outskirts and continued inward. Researchers estimate the streamer stars were born between 50 million and 100 million years ago. But these infant stars are being left behind as NGC 2445 continues to pull slowly away from NGC 2444.
Stars no older than one million to two million years old are forming closer to the centre of NGC 2445. Hubble’s keen vision reveals some individual stars, the brightest and most massive in the galaxy. Most of the brilliant blue clumps are groupings of stars and the pink blobs are glowing gas clouds enshrouding young, massive star clusters.
Although most of the action is happening in NGC 2445, it doesn’t mean the other member of the interacting pair has escaped unscathed. The gravitational tussle has stretched NGC 2444 into an odd shape, yanking gas far from the galaxy. NGC 2444 contains old stars and no new starbirth because it lost its gas long ago, well before this galactic encounter.
Aside from the star formation in NGC 2445, another interesting feature that Hubble has uncovered is the dark filaments of gas in the starburst galaxy’s bright core. Those features may have been formed by outbursts of material. Radio observations reveal a powerful source in the core that may be spearheading the outbursts. The radio source may have been produced by intense star formation or a black hole gobbling up material flowing into the centre.
It’s not uncommon for star formation to occur in the cores of galaxies, driven by interactions. Plenty of gas from galactic encounters flows into the centre, which can trigger the birth of new stars. Outflows from these stars can drive material out, but the dust created by these outbursts blankets the core and other regions throughout NGC 2445, making it difficult for Hubble to study in visible light.
However, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope will have the infrared vision to peer through the dust covering these regions to reveal the young star clusters that are hidden from view in visible-light images. In this way, Hubble and Webb will provide the full census of stars in NGC 2445. The census will help astronomers answer questions such as what the star-formation rate is, how long it takes for stars to form, and whether the starburst in NGC 2445 is fading or just heating up.
Studying young, massive star clusters still embedded in their dust and gas cocoons is important for understanding how star formation affects the evolution of galaxies. Massive stars that explode as supernovae enrich their environment with chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
The Arp 143 system is listed in a compendium of 338 unusual-looking interacting galaxies called the “Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies” published in 1966 by astronomer Halton Arp.
Credits: NASA, ESA, STScI, and J. Dalcanton (Center for Computational Astrophysics/Flatiron Inst., UWashington); CC BY 4.0
And feeling like I have had a work out - manual extractor and a lot of lifting and bending!
productive afternoon/evening
a grand total of 107 (1 lb jars of honey)
The Jesus And Mary Chain - Just Like Honey
This image by Jeff S. PhotoArt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License
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The Muskegon South Pierhead Light is a steel tapered cylindrical tower located at the west end of the south pier at the entry channel that connects Muskegon Lake with Lake Michigan. The light tower was constructed in 1903 and remains an active navigational light. .
Estimated to be 250 years old (maybe the same birthday as the USA?), this tree is the trademarked symbol of the Pebble Beach Company and the famous Pebble Beach Open.
In photography, the golden hour (sometimes known as magic hour, especially in cinematography) is a period shortly after sunrise or before sunset during which daylight is redder and softer compared to when the Sun is higher in the sky.
Picture 200 of my Project 365 ended up being another early morning cell phone shot of San Francisco. It was a beautiful morning, that the grainy picture doesn't do justice.
The green space in front is known as Crissy Field, a decommissioned military airfield, part of the Presidio.
Today is day 200 of Project 365 (Sunday).
Believed to be in Public Domain From Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Collections. More on copyright: What does "no known restrictions" mean?
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Public Domain. Additional source description and credit info from the Library of Congress:
TITLE: The war of wealth
CALL NUMBER: POS - TH - 1895 .W37, no. 1 (C size) [P&P]
REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-USZC4-591 (color film copy transparency)
LC-USZ6-380 (b&w film copy neg.)
RIGHTS INFORMATION: No known restrictions on publication.
MEDIUM: 1 print (poster) : lithograph, color ; 77 x 102 cm.
CREATED/PUBLISHED: Cin'ti ; N.Y. : Strobridge Lith. Co., c1895.
CREATOR:
Strobridge & Co. Lith.
RELATED NAMES:
Litt, Jacob.
Dazey, Charles Turner, 1855-1938.
NOTES:
Created and "copyright 1895 by The Strobridge Lith Co, Cin'ti. -- N.Y."
Jacob Litt, proprietor.
By C.T. Dazey, author of In old Kentucky.
Caption: The run on the bank : a crisis in the affairs of the great financial institution. The most animated and realistic scene ever shown on the stage.
N.Y. 6312.
SUBJECTS:
Business panics.
Banks.
Crowds.
Melodramas.
FORMAT:
Theatrical posters American.
Lithographs Color.
PART OF: Theatrical Poster Collection (Library of Congress)
REPOSITORY: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
DIGITAL ID: (digital file from intermediary roll copy film) var 0760 hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/var.0760
CONTROL #: var1994000815/PP
This square-format photo flips the zebra’s stripes into a stunning diagonal pattern. The unique angle and creative cropping turn the natural beauty of the zebra’s fur into an abstract masterpiece. The bold black and white contrast and dynamic lines make this image a standout, showcasing how a fresh perspective can reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary
The moon shot from my balchony in the city (Copenhagen), on a "warm" night (after a hot day). So probably not ideal atmospheric conditions for "astro photography". But still pretty cool?
I was using tripod, and I could probably easily have chosen a slower shutter speed and a lower the ISO speed. Must remember that next time...
These mushrooms popped up out of nowhere next to my parking space this autumn. They looked so nice I had to snap a photo of them.
This edit is completely out of my style and comfort zone, so any kind of feedback is welcome.
Non-commercial use allowed when name of photographer is mentioned. No derivative works allowed.
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If you find my work worth using, please humor me and read my About section!
Unfortunately many people take using photos they found online very lightly and disregard (or are unaware of) the fact that most of it is copyright protected and using it may have conditions or be completely disallowed. Before you use my photos, I ask that you read my About page so that we're both on the same page and avoid all the headaches that result from license violations and copyright infringements.
This scene reminded me of the book "Far from the Madding Crowd" by Thomas Hardy, when Gabriel's dog chase the sheep off the cliff.
William Holman Hunt OM (2 April 1827 – 7 September 1910) was an English painter and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His paintings were notable for their great attention to detail, vivid colour, and elaborate symbolism. These features were influenced by the writings of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, according to whom the world itself should be read as a system of visual signs. For Hunt it was the duty of the artist to reveal the correspondence between sign and fact. Of all the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt remained most true to their ideals throughout his career. He was always keen to maximise the popular appeal and public visibility of his works. Wikipedia.
Post processed in Topaz Labs/Simplify/BuzSim filters by me.
The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has observation time devoted to Saturn each year, thanks to the Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) program, and the dynamic gas giant planet always shows us something new. This latest image heralds the start of Saturn's "spoke season" with the appearance of two smudgy spokes in the B ring, on the left in the image.
The spokes are enigmatic features which appear across Saturn’s rings. Their presence and appearance varies with the seasons — like Earth, Saturn is tilted on its axis and therefore has four seasons. With Saturn's much larger orbit, each season lasts approximately seven Earth years. Equinox occurs when the rings are tilted edge-on to the Sun and marks the height of spokes’ visibility, while during a solstice when the Sun is at its highest or lowest latitude, the spokes disappear.
The shape and shading of spokes varies — they can appear light or dark, depending on the viewing angle, and sometimes appear more like blobs than classic radial spoke shapes, as seen here. The ephemeral features don't last long, but as the planet's autumnal equinox approaches on 6 May 2025, more will appear.
Scientists will be looking for clues to explain the cause and nature of the spokes. It's suspected they are caused by interaction between Saturn's magnetic field and the solar wind, which also causes aurorae to appear on the planet. The hypothesis is that spokes are the smallest, dust-sized, icy ring particles being temporarily electrically charged and levitated, but this has not been confirmed.
Saturn's last equinox occurred in 2009, while the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini spacecraft was orbiting the gas giant planet for close-up reconnaissance. With Cassini's mission completed in 2017, Hubble is continuing the work of long-term monitoring of changes on Saturn and the other outer planets.
[Image description: A close-up image of the planet Saturn. The rings are level with the viewer, and tilted slightly down.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble, NASA & A. Simon, A. Pagan (STScI); CC BY 4.0
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Photo by Frank N. Thomsen. License: Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 (details: creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)
One of his favourite poses in one of his favourite spots.
Posted for the Happy Caturday theme "Favourite Pose", 2026, October 17th.
I wish you all a wonderful and very Happy Caturday !!
We all are very well.
Although daddy was away from home for nearly three weeks, our neighbor came twice a day to give us our meals.
In Explore 2026/oct/16
A spectacular trio of merging galaxies in the constellation Boötes takes centre stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. These three galaxies are set on a collision course and will eventually merge into a single larger galaxy, distorting one another’s spiral structure through mutual gravitational interaction in the process. An unrelated foreground galaxy appears to float serenely alongside the collision, and the smudged shapes of much more distant galaxies are visible in the background.
This colliding trio — known to astronomers as SDSSCGB 10189 — is a relatively rare combination of three large star-forming galaxies lying within only 50 000 light-years of one another. While that might sound like a safe distance, for galaxies this makes them extremely close neighbours! Our own galactic neighbours are much further away; Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way, is more than 2.5 million light-years away from Earth.
This observation was designed to help astronomers understand the origin of the largest, most massive galaxies in the universe. These galactic behemoths are called Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCGs) and — as the name suggests — are defined as the brightest galaxies in any given galaxy cluster. Astronomers suspect that BCGs form through the merger of large, gas-rich galaxies like the ones in this image. They turned to Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys to investigate this galactic trio in painstaking detail, hoping to shed light on the formation of the Universe’s most massive galaxies.
[Image description: Three galaxies stand together just right of centre. They are close enough that they appear to be merging into one. Their shapes are distorted, with strands of gas and dust running between them. Each is emitting a lot of light. Further to the left is an unconnected, dimmer spiral galaxy. The background is dark, with a few smaller, dim and faint galaxies and a couple of stars.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Sun; CC BY 4.0
Buck stands, silent grace,
Between trees, nature's embrace,
Graceful woodland dance.
--- Haiku by ChatGPT
This work by Dennis Behm is licensed under a creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
The lazily winding spiral arms of the spectacular galaxy NGC 976 fill the frame of this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This spiral galaxy lies around 150 million light-years from the Milky Way in the constellation Aries. Despite its tranquil appearance, NGC 976 has played host to one of the most violent astronomical phenomena known — a supernova explosion. These cataclysmicly violent events take place at the end of the lives of massive stars, and can outshine entire galaxies for a short period. While supernovae mark the deaths of massive stars, they are also responsible for the creation of heavy elements that are incorporated into later generations of stars and planets.
Supernovae are also a useful aid for astronomers who measure the distances to faraway galaxies. The amount of energy thrown out into space by supernova explosions is very uniform, allowing astronomers to estimate their distances from how bright they appear to be when viewed from Earth. This image — which was created using data from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 — comes from a large collection of Hubble observations of nearby galaxies which host supernovae as well as a pulsating class of stars known as Cepheid variables. Both Cepheids and supernovae are used to measure astronomical distances, and galaxies containing both objects provide useful natural laboratories where the two methods can be calibrated against one another.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Jones, A. Riess et al.; CC BY 4.0
This jackrabbit didn't seem too worried about our proximity. We were on mile 15 of a 16-mile hike and could barely keep moving forward, so it was pretty safe!
On White Mountain in the eastern Sierra.
In this image, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures a side-on view of NGC 3568, a barred spiral galaxy roughly 57 million light-years from the Milky Way in the constellation Centaurus. In 2014 the light from a supernova explosion in NGC 3568 reached Earth — a sudden flare of light caused by the titanic explosion accompanying the death of a massive star. Whilst most astronomical discoveries are the work of teams of professional astronomers, this supernova was discovered by amateur astronomers from the Backyard Observatory Supernova Search in New Zealand. Dedicated amateur astronomers often make intriguing discoveries — particularly of fleeting astronomical phenomena such as supernovae.
This Hubble observation comes from a hoard of data built up to pave the way for future science with the upcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. By combining ground-based observations with data from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3, astronomers have built a treasure trove of data on the connections between young stars and the clouds of cold gas in which they form. One of Webb’s key science goals is to explore the life cycle of stars — particularly how and where stars are born. Since Webb observes at infrared wavelengths, it will be able to peer through the clouds of gas and dust in stellar nurseries and observe the fledgling stars within. Webb’s superb sensitivity will even allow astronomers to directly investigate faint protostellar cores — the earliest stages of star birth.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Sun; CC BY 4.0
The ultra-diffuse galaxy GAMA 526784 appears as a tenuous patch of light in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This wispy object resides in the constellation Hydra, roughly four billion light-years from Earth. Ultra-diffuse galaxies such as GAMA 526784 have a number of peculiarities. For example, their dark matter content can be either extremely low or extremely high — ultra-diffuse galaxies have been observed with an almost complete lack of dark matter, whereas others consist of almost nothing but dark matter. Another oddity of this class of galaxies is their anomalous abundance of bright globular clusters, something not observed in other types of galaxies.
Hubble captured GAMA 526784 with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), which was installed in 2002 by astronauts during Hubble Servicing Mission 3B. Since then, the instrument has played a pivotal role in some of Hubble’s most impressive scientific results, including capturing the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The ACS has also photographed Pluto in advance of the New Horizon mission, observed gargantuan gravitational lenses and found fully formed galaxies in the early Universe.
This image comes from a set of Hubble observations designed to shed light on the properties of ultra-diffuse galaxies. Hubble’s keen vision allowed astronomers to study GAMA 526784 in high resolution at ultraviolet wavelengths, helping to gauge the sizes and ages of the compact star-forming regions studding the galaxy.
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. van der Burg; CC BY 4.0
Acknowledgement: L. Shatz
This is a shot from my descent down from the Matterhorn. From this high up, it truly is a birds eye view of the valley below. Again, it's another shot from a week or two ago. I'm back in California now.
The star nicknamed Earendel (indicated here with an arrow) is positioned along a ripple in spacetime that gives it extreme magnification, allowing it to emerge into view from its host galaxy, which appears as a red smear across the sky. The whole scene is viewed through the distorted lens created by a massive galaxy cluster in the intervening space, which allows the galaxy's features to be seen, but also warps their appearance—an effect astronomers call gravitational lensing. The red dots on either side of Earendel are one star cluster that is mirrored on either side of the ripple, a result of the gravitational lensing distortion. The entire galaxy, called the Sunrise Arc, appears three times, and knots along its length are more mirrored star clusters. Earendel's unique position right along the line of most extreme magnification allows it to be detected, even though it is not a cluster.
With this observation, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the Universe’s birth in the Big Bang (at a redshift of 6.2) — the most distant individual star ever seen. This sets up a major target for the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope in its first year.
Learn more here.
Credits: NASA, ESA, B. Welch (JHU), D. Coe (STScI), A. Pagan (STScI); CC BY 4.0