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but getting close to it. Quite a few needing discarded as i picked them.
These are for roasting for use in pasta sauce
The Corrs & Bono - Summer Wine
Shy exploring one of the Crooked River tributaries yesterday. This is weather, he was made for. Still offline, be back later this week.
the Week is the spiral galaxy NGC 2566, which sits 76 million light-years away in the constellation Puppis. A prominent bar of stars stretches across the centre of this galaxy, and spiral arms emerge from each end of the bar. Because NGC 2566 appears tilted from our perspective, its disc takes on an almond shape, giving the galaxy the appearance of a cosmic eye.
As NGC 2566 gazes at us, astronomers gaze right back, using Hubble to survey the galaxy’s star clusters and star-forming regions. The Hubble data are especially valuable for studying stars that are just a few million years old; these stars are bright at the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths to which Hubble is sensitive. Using these data, researchers will measure the ages of NGC 2566’s stars, helping to piece together the timeline of the galaxy’s star formation and the exchange of gas between star-forming clouds and stars themselves.
Several other astronomical observatories have examined NGC 2566, including the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The Webb data complement this Hubble image, adding a view of NGC 2566’s warm, glowing dust to Hubble’s stellar portrait. At the long-wavelength end of the electromagnetic spectrum, NGC 2566 has also been observed by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). ALMA is a network of 66 radio telescopes that work together as one to capture detailed images of the clouds of gas in which stars form. Together, Hubble, Webb and ALMA provide an overview of the formation, lives and deaths of stars in galaxies across the Universe.
[Image Description: An oval-shaped spiral galaxy. Its core is a compact, glowing blue spot. A bright bar of light, lined with dark reddish dust, extends horizontally to the edge of the disc. A spiral arm emerges from each end of the bar and follows the edge of the disc, lined with blue and red glowing patches of stars, to the opposite end and a little off the galaxy. Blue stars are scattered between us and the galaxy.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, D. Thilker; CC BY 4.0
The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over the island of South Georgia. Linked with the South Sandwich Islands to form a British Overseas Territory, this southern Atlantic island is a haven for a vast array of wildlife.
Around five million seals call the islands home, as well as 65 million birds of 30 different species. Migrating whales and various fish species populate the surrounding waters and there is a large penguin population.
First discovered by Captain James Cook in 1775, there is no permanent human population on the island, due to its remote location and inhospitable environment. Nevertheless, a British Antarctic Survey research station operates in the capital, King Edward Point, in the island’s centre. This is a centre for applied fisheries research, while on Bird Island, lying off the north-west tip of South Georgia, scientists and support staff focus on research into bird and seal biology.
As we can see clearly in the image, South Georgia is mostly covered in snow. Its polar climate gives it short and very cold summers, and long, freezing and overcast winters. The rugged landscapes of the island are often said to leave visitors in awe, with two mountain ranges dominating - the Allardyce towards the middle of the island and Salvesen in the south.
In 2012 the UK Government designated South Georgia as one of the world’s largest sustainable use Marine Protected Areas. Significant investment has also been made in fisheries management and scientific research, as well as targeted conservation efforts to help protect the albatross. South Georgia is home to the Wandering Albatross – the largest flying bird species in the world.
Sentinel-2 is a two-satellite mission to supply the coverage and data delivery needed for Europe’s Copernicus programme. The mission’s frequent revisits over the same area and high spatial resolution allow changes in inland water bodies and the coastal environment to be closely monitored.
This image, which was captured on 22 February 2018, is also featured on the Earth from Space video programme.
Credits: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2018), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
I took this shot at the hypocenter of the nuclear blast in Hiroshima, which is the surface location directly below the nuclear explosion.
On Monday, August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m., the nuclear weapon "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima from the Enola Gay, and detonated approximately 600m directly above this exact spot, immediately killing at least 70,000 and destroying 70% of the city's buildings. In short, with a vanishingly small number of exceptions, anybody standing within 3/4 kilometer of where I was standing ceased to exist instantaneously. Of course the casualty numbers expanded dramatically over the coming days, and indeed months.
Truth be told, I'm not a bleeding heart, and can understand those who rationalize the necessity of this event, as much as those who believe it is an inexcusable horror that should never have happened. It did happen though, and the consequences were real and undeniable, and still can be felt when you stand in a place such as this. If you have the means and opportunity to visit Hiroshima sometime in your life, do.
In anticipation of the upcoming 35th anniversary of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, ESA/Hubble is continuing the celebrations with a new image of the Sombrero Galaxy, also known as Messier 104. An eye-catching target for Hubble and a favourite of amateur astronomers, the enigmatic Sombrero Galaxy has features of both spiral and elliptical galaxies. This image incorporates new processing techniques that highlight the unique structure of this galaxy.
As part of ESA/Hubble’s 35th anniversary celebrations, a new image series is being shared to revisit stunning Hubble targets that were previously released. First, a new image of NGC 346 was published. Now, ESA/Hubble is revisiting a fan-favourite galaxy with new image processing techniques. The new image reveals finer detail in the galaxy’s disc, as well as more background stars and galaxies.
Several Hubble images of the Sombrero Galaxy have been released over the past two decades, including this well-known Hubble image from October 2003. In November 2024, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope also gave an entirely new perspective on this striking galaxy.
Located around 30 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo, the Sombrero Galaxy is instantly recognisable. Viewed nearly edge on, the galaxy’s softly luminous bulge and sharply outlined disc resemble the rounded crown and broad brim of the Mexican hat from which the galaxy gets its name.
Though the Sombrero Galaxy is packed with stars, it’s surprisingly not a hotbed of star formation. Less than one solar mass of gas is converted into stars within the knotted, dusty disc of the galaxy each year. Even the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, which at 9 billion solar masses is more than 2000 times more massive than the Milky Way’s central black hole, is fairly calm.
The galaxy is too faint to be spotted with unaided vision, but it is readily viewable with a modest amateur telescope. Seen from Earth, the galaxy spans a distance equivalent to roughly one third of the diameter of the full Moon. The galaxy’s size on the sky is too large to fit within Hubble’s narrow field of view, so this image is actually a mosaic of several images stitched together.
One of the things that makes this galaxy especially notable is its viewing angle, which is inclined just six degrees off of the galaxy’s equator. From this vantage point, intricate clumps and strands of dust stand out against the brilliant white galactic nucleus and bulge, creating an effect not unlike Saturn and its rings – but on an epic galactic scale.
[Image description: The Sombrero Galaxy is an oblong, pale white disc with a glowing core. It appears nearly edge-on but is slanted slightly in the front, presenting a slightly top-down view of the inner region of the galaxy and its bright core. The outer disc is darker with shades of brown and black. Different coloured distant galaxies and various stars are speckled among the black background of space surrounding the galaxy.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, K. Noll; CC BY 4.0
This is a creative commons image, which you may freely use by linking to this page. Please respect the photographer and his work.
Just across the Potomac River from Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. If you wish to license them for commercial purposes, want to purchase prints or are interested in commissioning me to take photos, please send me a Flickr mail or visit my website, www.memoriesbymike.zenfolio.com/, for contact information. Thanks.]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. If you wish to license them for commercial purposes, want to purchase prints or are interested in commissioning me to take photos, please send me a Flickr mail or visit my website, www.memoriesbymike.zenfolio.com/, for contact information. Thanks.]
Today’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week features the glorious spiral galaxy NGC 5643, which is located roughly 40 million light-years away in the constellation Lupus. NGC 5643 is what’s known as a grand design spiral, referring to how the galaxy’s two large, winding spiral arms are clear to see. The spiral arms are defined by bright blue stars, lacy reddish-brown dust clouds and pink star-forming regions.
As fascinating as the galaxy appears at visible wavelengths, some of NGC 5643’s most interesting features are invisible to the human eye. Ultraviolet and X-ray images and spectra of NGC 5643 show that the galaxy hosts an active galactic nucleus: an especially bright galactic core powered by a feasting supermassive black hole. When a supermassive black hole ensnares gas from its surroundings, the gas collects in a disc that heats up to hundreds of thousands of degrees. The superheated gas shines brightly across the electromagnetic spectrum, but especially at X-ray wavelengths.
NGC 5643’s active galactic nucleus isn’t the brightest source of X-rays in the galaxy, though. Researchers using ESA’s XMM-Newton discovered an even brighter X-ray-emitting object, called NGC 5643 X-1, on the galaxy’s outskirts. What could be a more powerful source of X-rays than a supermassive black hole? Surprisingly, the answer appears to be a much smaller black hole! While the exact identity of NGC 5643 X-1 is not yet known, evidence points to a black hole that is about 30 times more massive than the Sun. Locked in an orbital dance with a companion star, the black hole ensnares gas from its stellar companion, creating a superheated disc that outshines the galactic centre.
NGC 5643 was also the subject of a previous Picture of the Week. The new image incorporates additional wavelengths of light, including the red color that is characteristic of gas heated by massive young stars.
[Image Description: A close-up of a spiral galaxy, seen face-on. Its center is a bright white point, surrounded by a large yellowish oval with thin lines of dust swirling in it. From the sides of the oval emerge two bright spiral arms which wind through the round disc of the galaxy, filled with shining pink spots where stars are forming and more dark reddish dust. Many stars can be seen in the foreground, over and around the galaxy.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess, D. Thilker, D. De Martin (ESA/Hubble), M. Zamani (ESA/Hubble); CC BY 4.0
The Circinus Galaxy, a galaxy about 13 million light-years away, contains an active supermassive black hole that continues to influence its evolution. The largest source of infrared light from the region closest to the black hole itself was thought to be outflows, or streams of superheated matter that fire outward.
Now, new observations from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope provide evidence that reverses this thinking, suggesting that most of the hot, dusty material is actually feeding the central black hole. The technique used to gather this data also has the potential to analyze the outflow and accretion components for other nearby black holes.
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a full view of the Circinus galaxy, a nearby spiral galaxy about 13 million light-years away. The inset highlights a close-up from Webb of the galaxy’s core, where infrared observations pierce through dust to reveal hot material feeding its central supermassive black hole. Webb’s image, made using the Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI) tool on its NIRISS (Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph) instrument, isolates hot dust in the immediate surroundings of the supermassive black hole, revealing that most of the infrared emission comes from a compact, dusty structure feeding the black hole rather than from outflowing material. In the Webb image, the inner face of the torus glows in infrared light, while the darker areas represent where the outer ring is blocking light.
The research, which includes the sharpest image of a black hole’s surroundings ever taken by Webb, was published today in Nature. Learn more about this result here.
[Image description: Image shows a large spiral galaxy that has a bright white center, with several lanes of reddish-brown dust and gas in between faint white arms. The galaxy takes up the center third of the frame. There are several thousand stars, some with diffraction spikes, scattered around the image. This image is labeled Hubble. A small box outlining an area at the center of the galaxy leads to a pullout square at the top right. The image, labeled Webb, is dark with a white glowing oval at the center.]
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, E. Lopez-Rodriguez (University of South Carolina), D. Thatte (STScI), Image Processing: A. Pagan (STScI). Acknowledgment: NSF's NOIRLab, CTIO; CC BY 4.0
Today’s ESA/Hubble Picture of the Week features the spiral galaxy NGC 4535, which is situated about 50 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo (The Maiden). This galaxy has been nicknamed the ‘Lost Galaxy’ because it’s extremely faint when viewed through a small telescope. With a mirror spanning 2.4 metres across, Hubble is well equipped to observe dim galaxies like NGC 4535 and pick out features like its massive spiral arms and central bar of stars.
On full display in this Hubble image are NGC 4535’s young star clusters, which dot the galaxy’s spiral arms. Many of the groupings of bright blue stars are enclosed by glowing pink clouds. These clouds, called H II (‘H-two’) regions, are a sign that the galaxy is home to especially young, hot, and massive stars that are blazing with high-energy radiation. By heating the clouds in which they were born, shooting out powerful stellar winds, and eventually exploding as supernovae, massive stars certainly shake up their surroundings.
This Hubble image incorporates data from an observing programme that will catalogue roughly 50 000 H II regions in nearby star-forming galaxies like NGC 4535. A previous image of NGC 4535 was released in 2021. Both the 2021 image and today’s image incorporate observations from the PHANGS programme, which seeks to understand the connections between young stars and cold gas. Today’s image adds a new dimension to our understanding of NGC 4535 by capturing the brilliant red glow of the nebulae that encircle massive stars in their first few million years of life.
[Image Description: A close-in view of a spiral galaxy that faces the viewer. Brightly lit spiral arms swing outwards through the galaxy’s disc, starting from an elliptical region in the centre. Thick strands of dark reddish dust are spread across the disc, mostly following the spiral arms. The arms also contain many glowing pink-red spots where stars form. The galaxy is a bit fainter beyond the arms, but speckled with blue stars.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, F. Belfiore, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team; CC BY 4.0
A weekend paint job at the Square Deal Auto Repair in Pinole.Ithink the painter used the sky as his palette.
The flower pods form in whorls along the stems, creating a striking visual effect with their dark blue to violet blooms
Raspberry blackout cake. loads of home grown raspberries (red and yellow) in this cake!
And plum jam in the cake mix too.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. If you wish to license them for commercial purposes, want to purchase prints or are interested in commissioning me to take photos, please send me a Flickr mail or visit my website, www.memoriesbymike.zenfolio.com/, for contact information. Thanks.]
We dont actually get much snow so always a bit of novelty factor associated. All the better on a day I dont have to go to work. Having said that I have not actually gone out in it - just lit the fire and pointed the camera out various windows!
Lou Doillon - Snowed In
... maybe it's behind these trees.
These are immature Bishop Pines, this area was devastated by a fire more than 20 years ago in 1995, and most of the fauna and flora are still recovering.
Today is day 17 of Project 365.
No awards... Merci :)
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All rights reserved - Tous droits réservés
Model : Ludivine
Christine Lebrasseur - Photographe
French Website / Site en français
Dit werk is gelicenseerd onder een Creative Commons Naamsvermelding-NietCommercieel-GelijkDelen 3.0 Unported licentie
Festival Levende Geschiedenis
Strobist information:
Tri flash bracket triggering Nikon SB's at 1/2 power through Phottix Hero's high left reflected in Umbrella and one bare single Nikon SB down left camera at 1/2 power.
Nikon D3 @ ISO 100 35mm f/10 1/200sec
Custom created Lightroom preset "Militaria"
Finished up in PS CS 5.5
It is definitely the weather for our wood burning stove.
The BBC weather says it will be minus 7 tonight which is very cold for us.
Been seeing a few of these on widow sills - Not quite sure what they are. Maybe Chrysolina sp.
the lines on the card are 8mm apart so the body of the beetle is about 1.2 cm I think (or maybe a bit less)
In celebration of the 34th anniversary of the launch of the legendary NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers took a snapshot of the Little Dumbbell Nebula (also known as Messier 76, M76, or NGC 650/651) located 3400 light-years away in the northern circumpolar constellation Perseus. The photogenic nebula is a favourite target of amateur astronomers.
M76 is classified as a planetary nebula. This is a misnomer because it is unrelated to planets. But its round shape suggested it was a planet to astronomers who first viewed it through low-power telescopes. In reality, a planetary nebula is an expanding shell of glowing gases that were ejected from a dying red giant star. The star eventually collapses to an ultra-dense, hot white dwarf.
M76 is composed of a ring, seen edge-on as the central bar structure, and two lobes on either opening of the ring. Before the star burned out, it ejected the ring of gas and dust. The ring was probably sculpted by the effects of the star that once had a binary companion star. This sloughed-off material created a thick disc of dust and gas along the plane of the companion’s orbit. The hypothetical companion star isn’t seen in the Hubble image, and so it could have been later swallowed by the central star. The disc would be forensic evidence for that stellar cannibalism.
The primary star is collapsing to form a white dwarf. It is one of the hottest stellar remnants known at a scorching 120 000 degrees Celsius, 24 times our Sun’s surface temperature. The sizzling white dwarf can be seen as a pinpoint in the centre of the nebula. A star visible in projection beneath it is not part of the nebula.
Pinched off by the disc, two lobes of hot gas are escaping from the top and bottom of the ‘belt’ along the star’s rotation axis that is perpendicular to the disc. They are being propelled by the hurricane-like outflow of material from the dying star, tearing across space at two million miles per hour. That’s fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in a little over seven minutes! This torrential ‘stellar wind’ is ploughing into cooler, slower-moving gas that was ejected at an earlier stage in the star’s life, when it was a red giant. Ferocious ultraviolet radiation from the super-hot star is causing the gases to glow. The red colour is from nitrogen, and blue is from oxygen.
The entire nebula is a flash in the pan by cosmological timekeeping. It will vanish in about 15 000 years.
[Image description: A Hubble image of the Little Dumbbell Nebula. The name comes from its shape, which is a two-lobed structure of colourful, mottled glowing gases that resemble a balloon that has been pinched around a middle waist. Like an inflating balloon, the lobes are expanding into space from a dying star seen as a white dot in the centre. Blistering ultraviolet radiation from the super-hot star is causing the gases to glow. The red colour is from nitrogen, and blue is from oxygen.]
Credits: NASA, ESA, STScI, A. Pagan (STScI); CC BY 4.0