Goddard Space Flight Center
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Muchas, muchas gracias por sus visitas, favs y comentarios :)
Many, many thanks for your visits, favs and comments :)
Olympus & 60 mm macro.
A beautiful galactic dance 211 million light years away. Captured by Hubble WFC3 and processed by me.
La galaxie spirale NGC 634 (Hubble) est située à 217 millions d'années-lumière de la Terre dans la constellation du Triangle (Triangulum). La finesse des détails et la structure spirale exceptionnellement parfaite de la galaxie en ont fait une cible d'observation privilégiée suite à la disparition violente d'une naine blanche. La supernova de type Ia SN2008a y avait ainsi été repérée et brièvement rivalisé d'éclat avec la galaxie hôte.
Les naines blanches constituent le point final de l'évolution des étoiles dont la masse se situe entre 0,07 et 8 masses solaires, soit 97 % des étoiles de la Voie lactée. Avec toutefois des exceptions, dans un système binaire une naine blanche peut accréter la matière provenant de son étoile compagnon et prendre progressivement du poids. Mais l'étoile peut finir par devenir trop pleine, lorsqu'elle dépasse 1,38 masse solaire. Des réactions nucléaires se déclenchent en produisant d'énormes quantités d'énergie et l'étoile explose en supernova de type Ia.
Cette image a été créée à partir d'images prises avec le canal grand champ de la caméra avancée de Hubble. Ces images ont été obtenues à travers un filtre jaune (F555W, coloré en bleu), combinées avec celles images obtenues à travers des filtres rouge (F625W, coloré en vert) et proche infrarouge (F775W, coloré en rouge). Les temps d'exposition totaux par filtre étaient respectivement de 3 750 s, 3 530 s et 2 484 s, et le champ de vision de 2,5 x 1,5 minute d'arc, soir 0,062° (cf. ESA/Hubble et NASA).
Pour situer la galaxie spirale NGC 634 (Hubble) dans la constellation du Triangle (Triangulum) :
A macro of a glass of coffee, for Macro Monday, on the theme of beverage.
This was my second try at it, as the first try gave me some very lukewarm image. Also had to take a photo, then leave it for a few seconds, then go back, as the lense kept fogging up!
I was originally going to leave this as colour, but popped it into silver efex after color efex, just to see and I really liked it.
Nikon Z6, 18mm Extension Tube, FTZ, Tamron 90mm Macro Lense, Ring FLash,
Exposure X5, Color Efex Pro 4, Silver Efex Pro 2
This image is 2-panel mosaic of NGC 3372 (Eta Carinae nebula), one of the brightest and largest DSOs in the night sky.
The image is the result of a 2-panel mosaic in SHO. Aiming at a 9-panel mosaic to cover the entire nebula...hoping my computer's graphics card can handle it 😅. A total of 14hr integration time so far.
Gear used
HEQ5 Pro, 6in reflector, ASI183MM Pro Cooled(imaging), ASI120MM mini (guiding),Baader Mpcc mkiii coma corrector, ASIAir Pro, Optolong Ha 7nm,Optolong Oiii 6.5nm, Optolong Sii 6.5nm, ZWO EAF, ZWO filter drawer
109 x 420s subs at gain 111, -10°C, bin 2x2
The star at the center (η Car) was once the second brightest star in the night sky after it suddenly exploded in the 19th century...an event known as The Great Eruption.
Insta
Astrobin
It's Dog Day Monday again! I can't believe another week has flown bye.
Meet Hubble. All I know is that he was not named after the space station or Edwin Hubble after whom the space station was named. Hubble was a loveable, happy-go-lucky Welsh Corgi that lived right around the corner from us until he and his owners moved out of the Bay Area in 2014. Every time I'd meet him, he'd "smile." Don't get the idea that every dog I'm going to show you is smiling. I'm getting into the more serious group and then, just plain old. And, you know, we get grumpy as dogs, especially the two who I'll be showing you in a few weeks that were 17 when I met them.
Anyway, Happy Dog Day Monday #19. Any day with a dog is a happy one (a gross exaggeration, but not as exaggerated as any day without a dog isn't half as great as a day with one). When you unravel that, go rescue a dog.
Cats are okay, too, but from what I've seen on You Tube (and at my nephew's home), they are usually cantankerous, shredding rugs and couches, and love to throw things off countertops. So do parrots, but at least a parrot will talk to you while you're trying to correct them. Our cockatiel used to sing all the radio commercials he'd learned from the radio while we went to school. That was 61 years ago. My favorite, "Where there's Life, there's Lucky Strikes!"
For today’s Macro Mondays challenge (outer space) I present Nancy G. Roman in LEGO. She is one of several space related LEGO people in our little collection.
Hubble rocks out with heavy metal stars!
This 10.5-billion-year-old globular cluster, NGC 6496, is home to heavy-metal stars of a celestial kind! The stars comprising this spectacular spherical cluster are enriched with much higher proportions of metals — elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are curiously known as metals in astronomy — than stars found in similar clusters.
A handful of these high-metallicity stars are also variable stars, meaning that their brightness fluctuates over time. NGC 6496 hosts a selection of long-period variables — giant pulsating stars whose brightness can take up to, and even over, a thousand days to change — and short-period eclipsing binaries, which dim when eclipsed by a stellar companion.
The nature of the variability of these stars can reveal important information about their mass, radius, luminosity, temperature, composition, and evolution, providing astronomers with measurements that would be difficult or even impossible to obtain through other methods.
NGC 6496 was discovered in 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop. The cluster resides at about 35,000 light-years away in the southern constellation of Scorpius (The Scorpion).
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt
Text credit: European Space Agency
Read more: go.nasa.gov/1U2wqGW
… no not the space telescope, the (T)Oil and Trouble one.
Another quick on for Sliders Sunday. I am working on a couple of sets as project, but neither is near enough to completion to share, and time is limited for me just now.
Never one to throw away images (though I am trying to learn how) I have repurposed one of my oil droplet images from Smile on Saturday’s project yesterday. The starting image had lots of detail and texture and a little bit of colour variation from using two oils (see the comment from yesterday for more if you wish).
The work was done mainly in Affinity though I did us a bit of Nik Color Efex to tweak it a bit at the end.
The basic approach takes an oft-travelled path for me. Duplicate the image layer, flip it horizontally and vertically to give the overall result some symmetry and blend the two layers together with Difference blend mode (or any other mode that works for you) which injects lots of colours. The rest is just tweaking the colours.
I’ll post a link to the in-camera image so you can see the rather bland (in comparison) starting point.
Thanks for taking the time to look. I hope you enjoy the image. Happy Sliders Sunday :)
L'amas globulaire NGC 6101 (Hubble), également connu sous le nom de Caldwell 107, est situé à 36 000 (47 700 ?) années-lumière de la Terre dans la constellation de l'Oiseau de paradis (Apus). Son âge est d'environ 11,39 milliards d'années. C'est un amas globulaire atypique, car il a l'apparence d'être jeune : ses étoiles ne paraissent pas avoir subi de ségrégation, étant uniformément réparties dans l'amas, maisil est réellement vieux, avec un âge de l'ordre de celui de notre galaxie : 13 milliards d'annéesavec un cœur apparemment sous-peuplé en étoiles.
Pour comprendre cette anomalie, l'équipe de l'Université de Surrey a donc eu l'idée de recréer numériquement l'amas globulaire et son évolution dynamique depuis sa naissance. Ils ont ainsi produit des simulations numériques à N corps en introduisant chaque étoile individuelle, ainsi qu'une population de trous noirs, en prenant en compte leur comportements respectifs sur une durée équivalente à 13 milliards d'années.
En augmentant progressivement le nombre de trous noirs stellaires dans NGC 6101, Miklos Peuten et ses collaborateurs parviennent finalement à retrouver exactement le profil de l'amas aujourd'hui.
L'anomalie de la dynamique des étoiles dans NGC 6101 peut donc être un produit de la présence de plusieurs centaines de trous noirs stellaires, objets de quelques masses solaires qui se forment par l'effondrement gravitationnel d'étoiles massives lors de supernovas. Comme on pensait auparavant que ce type de trous noirs devaient être facilement éjectés de l'amas globulaire lors de l'explosion. Si le résultat de Peuten et ses collègues est confirmé par des observations, la formation des trous noirs dans les amas pourrait être à revoir. Ce n'est qu'en 2012 et 2013 en effet que les chercheurs ont trouvé par l'observation des trous noirs dans des amas globulaires (par exemple M22 et M63), par l'émission X accompagnant leur accrétion de matière.
Des études antérieures avaient montré que si l'impulsion initiale de la supernova n'était pas suffisante pour éjecter le trou noir d'un amas à sa création, une fraction importante de trous noirs pourraient y être retenus durant 12 milliards d'années, ce qui semble être le cas dans les amas ayant une grande dimension initiale. NGC 6101 a aussi une autre particularité, qui est que son orbite galactique est rétrograde, indiquant une probable origine extragalactique. Il a même été suggéré en 2004 que NGC 6101 pourrait provenir de la galaxie naine Canis Major et aurait été "attrapé" par la Voie lactée.
Un des indices pour étayer cette hypothèse est que le cœur de grande dimension de cet amas ressemble beaucoup à ce qui est observé dans les amas globulaires de galaxies naines, mais moins dans ceux de la Voie Lactée. D'où la question : pourquoi les amas globulaires des galaxies naines posséderaient-ils plus de trous noirs que ceux des grandes galaxies ? Le taux de production de trous noirs serait la même, mais c'est la densité plus faible des amas globulaires formés dans les galaxies naines qui induirait une plus grande rétention des trous noirs dans ces amas.
La présence de nombreux trous noirs dans le centre de certains amas globulaires pourrait indiquer que c'est avant tout dans ces régions qu'il faut chercher des sources d'ondes gravitationnelles, quand ils se mettent à fusionner... Il faut donc maintenant trouver leur trace par l'observation, mais c'est un peu plus difficile que de faire tourner un code de calcul sur un superordinateur (cf. Source : A stellar-mass black hole population in the globular cluster NGC 6101, M. Peuten et al).
Pour situer l'amas globulaire NGC 6101 (Hubble) dans la constellation de l'Oiseau de paradis (Apus) :
The Hubble Space telescope's observations of the universe have seldom produced more intriguing images than that seen in this section of bubble glass in the window of a public house.
We are back from Portugal, a little jet-lagged (always milder going east to west than vice-versa) and none the worse for the wear. Time to upload the 1,136 images that I took. Here's a garden abstract from the archives while I get to it. :)
- Rosa's Garden of Earthly Delights, Keefer Lake, Ontario, Canada -
Lors du lancement du télescope spatial Hubble il y a 35 ans, personne n'aurait pu imaginer à quel point il allait transformer notre vision de l'espace. Lancé le 24 avril 1990, le télescope poursuit aujourd'hui sa mission. Pour célébrer son anniversaire, la NASA a publié quatre images récentes prises par Hubble, qui prouvent sa pérennité, même après trois décennies !
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When the launched 35 years ago, no one would have guessed how much it would shape the way we view space. Launched on April 24, 1990, the telescope continues its mission today. To celebrate its anniversary, NASA released four recent images taken by Hubble that prove its staying power even after three decades !
Credit : NASA, ESA, STScI; Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI)
Dans la constellation du Poisson Volant (Volans) à 300 millions d'a.l. de la Terre, l'anneau de Lindsay-Shapley AM 0644-741 est une galaxie lenticulaire non barrée et en anneau. Elle avait autrefois un noyau jaunâtre qui était le centre d’une galaxie spirale normale. Il se serait formé par une collision avec une autre galaxie, ce qui a déclenché un effet gravitationnel et une perturbation provoquant la condensation de la poussière, ce qui l'a forcé à s'étendre et à créer un anneau. D'une taille de 150 000 a.l., il possède aujourd'hui une région de formation d'étoiles dominée par de jeunes étoiles massives, bleues et chaudes. Les régions roses le long de l'anneau sont des nuages raréfiés d'hydrogène gazeux rougeoyant et fluorescent, alors qu'il est bombardé par une forte lumière ultraviolette émise par les étoiles bleues. Il continuera à s’étendre pendant encore 300 millions d’années, après quoi il commencera à se désintégrer.
Outre les deux grandes structures galactiques proches, plusieurs galaxies très éloignées sont visibles sur l'image, principalement dans sa partie inférieure gauche. Les deux stries rougeâtres et les autres petites structures elliptiques témoignent que leur lumière a été émise bien avant celle des galaxies voisines et qu'elles sont donc bien plus éloignées de nous dans l’espace-temps (cf. site Hubble).
Pour situer l'astre dans sa constellation :
www.flickr.com/photos/7208148@N02/48950795956/in/datepost...
A black hole forms in a giant cumulus cloud where nothing can escape, well not actually nothing but it’s toil and trouble for somebody, that ship on the horizon for instance.
A 130 millions d'a.l., les bras gracieux et sinueux de la majestueuse galaxie spirale NGC 3147, d'un diamètre de 83 000 a.l., apparaissent comme un grand escalier en spirale balayant l’espace dans cette image du télescope spatial Hubble. Ce sont en fait de longues bandes de jeunes étoiles bleues, de nébuleuses roses et de poussière. La beauté de la galaxie dément le fait qu’en son centre même se trouve un trou noir mal nourri, entouré d’un disque mince et compact d’étoiles, de gaz et de poussière qui ont été pris dans un maelstrom gravitationnel. La gravité du trou noir est si intense que tout ce qui s’aventure près de lui est balayé dans le disque. Ce dernier est si profondément ancré dans le champ gravitationnel intense du trou noir que la lumière du disque de gaz est modifiée, selon les théories de relativité d’Einstein, donnant aux astronomes un aperçu unique des processus dynamiques proches (cf. hubblesite.org).
Pour mieux situer l'astre dans sa constellation :
www.flickr.com/photos/7208148@N02/48686608841/in/datepost...
After seeing yesterday's APOD, a Hubble Legacy Archive image processed by Hunter Wilson; (apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160309.html) I really enjoyed the presentation, but there were a few things that I didn't like about the way the image was processed. So naturally I decided to have a go at it myself and downloaded the data from the website last night (hla.stsci.edu/) and started tinkering with it this morning. I finished it to an initial satisfactory processing and was quite pleased at the results!
Clustered at the center of this image are six brilliant spots of light, four of them creating a circle around a central pair. Appearances can be deceiving, however, as this formation is not composed of six individual galaxies, but is actually two separate galaxies and one distant quasar imaged four times. Data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope also indicates that there is a seventh spot of light in the very center, which is a rare fifth image of the distant quasar. This rare phenomenon is the result of the two central galaxies, which are in the foreground, acting as a lens.
The four bright points around the galaxy pair, and the fainter one in the very center, are in fact five separate images of a single quasar (known as 2M1310-1714), an extremely luminous but distant object. The reason we see this quintuple effect is a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when a celestial object with an enormous amount of mass – such as a pair of galaxies – causes the fabric of space to warp. When light from a distant object travels through that gravitationally warped space, it is magnified and bent around the huge mass. This allows humans here on Earth to observe multiple, magnified images of the far-away source. The quasar in this image actually lies farther away from Earth than the pair of galaxies. The galaxy pair’s enormous mass bent and magnified the light from the distant quasar, giving the incredible appearance that the galaxies are surrounded by four quasars – when in reality, a single quasar lies far beyond them!
Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) imaged the trio in spectacular detail. It was installed on Hubble in 2009 during Hubble Servicing Mission 4, Hubble’s final servicing mission. WFC3 continues to provide both top-quality data and fantastic images 12 years after its installation.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, T. Treu; Acknowledgment: J. Schmidt
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.
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Spanning from 2003 to 2021, this collection of images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features galaxies that are all hosts to both Cepheid variables and supernovae. These two celestial phenomena are both crucial tools used by astronomers to determine astronomical distance, and have been used to refine our measurement of Hubble’s constant, the expansion rate of the Universe.
Credits: NASA, ESA CC BY 4.0
Spotted in Explore by DMC43. Thanks Donna! #228 23/11/08
Pretty chilly here today so back to indoor flowers for the moment!
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows two of the galaxies in the galactic triplet Arp 248 — also known as Wild's Triplet — which lies around 200 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The two large spiral galaxies visible in this image — which flank a smaller, unrelated background spiral galaxy — seem to be connected by a luminous bridge. This elongated stream of stars and interstellar dust is known as a tidal tail, and it was formed by the mutual gravitational attraction of the two foreground galaxies.
This observation comes from a project which delves into two rogues’ galleries of weird and wonderful galaxies: A Catalogue Of Southern Peculiar Galaxies And Associations, compiled by astronomers Halton Arp and Barry Madore, and the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, compiled by Halton Arp. Each collection contains a menagerie of spectacularly peculiar galaxies, including interacting galaxies such as Arp 248, as well as one- or three-armed spiral galaxies, galaxies with shell-like structures, and a variety of other space oddities.
Hubble used its Advanced Camera for Surveys to scour this menagerie of eccentric galaxies in search of promising candidates for future observations with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, and Hubble itself. With such a wealth of astronomical objects to study in the night sky, projects such as this, which guide future observations, are a valuable investment of observing time. As well as the scientific merits of observing these weird and wonderful galaxies, they were also — very unusually — selected as Hubble targets because of their visual appeal to the general public!
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA, J. Dalcanton; CC BY 4.0
[Image description: Two spiral galaxies are viewed almost face-on; they are a mix of pale blue and yellow in colour, crossed by strands of dark red dust. They lie in the upper-left and lower-right corners. A long, faint streak of pale blue joins them, extending from an arm of one galaxy and crossing the field diagonally. A small spiral galaxy, orange in colour, is visible edge-on, left of the lower galaxy.]
Spiral galaxy UGC 11537 lies so close to the plane of the Milky Way that stars from our own galaxy have crept into the image – the two prominent stars in front of UGC 11537 are interlopers from within the Milky Way.
The spikes surrounding these stars, called diffraction spikes, are the result of starlight interacting with the structure that supports Hubble’s secondary mirror.
The bright bands of stars and dark clouds of dust threading throughout the galaxy are captured here in infrared and visible light.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Seth
Read more: go.nasa.gov/31G62zU
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission.
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Made with a Sony a7s + 70-200 mm + Staradventurer travel mount, processed with Pixinsight.
A bit of explanation :
This image is composed of ~100 pictures of single 30s, so a total of ~50 mn of exposure.
During one of the frame, Hubble passed from right to left and disappeared in the Earth shadow!!!
We had too successive possible nights with kind of the same framing, I think this was the first one (04/04/2018 20h59). It was also very windy, that explains the weird corkscrew trajectory of Hubble on the right.
Cette photomosaïque de la galaxie d'Andromède, située à 2,5 millions d'années-lumière de la Terre, est la plus grande jamais créée à partir d'images du télescope spatial Hubble. Elle comprend plus de 600 images du télescope et a nécessité plus d'une décennie de travail. La photomosaïque comprend 200 millions d'étoiles, soit une fraction de la population d'étoiles estimée à mille milliards d'étoiles d'Andromède.
« Les régions intéressantes comprennent : (a) des amas d'étoiles bleues brillantes intégrées dans la galaxie, des galaxies d'arrière-plan vues beaucoup plus loin et un bombardement photographique par quelques étoiles brillantes au premier plan qui sont en fait à l'intérieur de notre Voie lactée ; (b) NGC 206, le nuage d'étoiles le plus visible d'Andromède ; (c) un jeune amas d'étoiles bleues nouveau-nées ; (d) la galaxie satellite M32, qui pourrait être le noyau résiduel d'une galaxie qui est entrée en collision avec Andromède ; (e) des bandes de poussière sombres à travers une myriade d'étoiles.
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This photomosaic of the Andromeda galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years from Earth, is the largest ever created using images from the Hubble Space Telescope. It features over 600 Hubble images and required over a decade to make. The composite features 200 million stars, a fraction of Andromeda’s estimated trillion-star population.
Interesting regions include: (a) Clusters of bright blue stars embedded within the galaxy, background galaxies seen much farther away, and photo-bombing by a couple bright foreground stars that are actually inside our Milky Way; (b) NGC 206 the most conspicuous star cloud in Andromeda; (c) A young cluster of blue newborn stars; (d) The satellite galaxy M32, that may be the residual core of a galaxy that once collided with Andromeda; (e) Dark dust lanes across myriad stars.
Crédit : NASA, ESA, Benjamin F. Williams (Université de Washington), Zhuo Chen (Université de Washington), L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern) ; traitement des images : Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
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This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows two of the galaxies in the galactic triplet Arp 248 – also known as Wild's Triplet – which lies around 200 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The two large spiral galaxies visible in this image – which flank a smaller, unrelated background spiral galaxy – appear connected by a luminous bridge. This elongated stream of stars and interstellar dust is known as a tidal tail, and it formed by the mutual gravitational attraction of the two foreground galaxies.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Dark Energy Survey/Department of Energy/Fermilab Cosmic Physics Center/Dark Energy Camera/Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory/NOIRLab/National Science Foundation/AURA Astronomy; J. Dalcanton
#NASA #NASAMarshall #NASAGoddard #ESA #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #astrophysics #galaxy
This luminous Picture of the Week shows Z 229-15 — imaged here in beautiful detail by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope — a celestial object that lies about 390 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra. Z 229-15 is one of those interesting celestial objects that, should you choose to research it, you will find defined as several different things: sometimes as an active galactic nucleus (an AGN); sometimes as a quasar; and sometimes as a Seyfert galaxy. Which of these is Z 229-15 really? The answer is that it is all of these things all at once, because these three definitions have significant overlap.
AGNs and quasars are both described in detail in the Hubble Word Bank, but in essence an AGN is a small region at the heart of certain galaxies (called active galaxies) that is far brighter than just the galaxy’s stars would be. The extra luminosity is due to the presence of a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core. Material sucked into a black hole actually doesn’t fall directly into it, but instead is drawn into a swirling disc, from where it is inexorably tugged towards the black hole. This disc of matter gets so hot that it releases a large amount of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, and that’s what makes AGNs appear so bright.
Quasars are a particular type of AGN; they are typically both extremely bright and extremely distant from Earth — several hundred million light-years is considered nearby for a quasar, making Z 229-15 positively local. Often an AGN is so bright that the rest of the galaxy cannot be seen, but Seyfert galaxies are active galaxies that host very bright AGNs (quasars) while the rest of the galaxy is still observable. So Z 229-15 is a Seyfert galaxy that contains a quasar, and that, by definition, hosts an AGN. Classification in astronomy can be a challenge!
[Image Description: A spiral galaxy. It has two almost-straight arms coming from the left and right of the core that meet a starry ring around the galaxy’s edge. The ring is bluish in colour, and the core is golden and shining. A faint halo of light also surrounds the galaxy. There is one bright star with many diffraction spikes, and a few small stars all around on a black background.]
Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Barth, R. Mushotzky; CC BY 4.0
The galaxy NGC 6946 is nothing short of spectacular. In the last century alone, NGC 6946 has experienced 10 observed supernovae, earning its nickname as the Fireworks Galaxy. In comparison, our Milky Way averages just one to two supernova events per century. This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the stars, spiral arms, and various stellar environments of NGC 6946 in phenomenal detail.
We are able to marvel at NGC 6946 as it is a face-on galaxy, which means that we see the galaxy “facing” us, rather than seeing it from the side (known as edge-on). The Fireworks Galaxy is further classified as an intermediate spiral galaxy and as a starburst galaxy. The former means the structure of NGC 6946 sits between a full spiral and a barred spiral galaxy, with only a slight bar in its center, and the latter means it has an exceptionally high rate of star formation.
The galaxy resides 25.2 million light-years away, along the border of the northern constellations of Cepheus and Cygnus (The Swan).
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Leroy, K.S. Long
#NASA #MarshallSpaceFlightCenter #MSFC #Marshall #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #astronomy #space #astrophysics #solarsystemandbeyond #gsfc #Goddard #GoddardSpaceFlightCenter #galaxy
This is an image of the Cartwheel Galaxy taken with the NASA/ESA (European Space Agency) Hubble Space Telescope.
The object was first spotted on wide-field images from the U.K. Schmidt telescope and then studied in detail using the Anglo-Australian Telescope.
Lying about 500 million light-years away in the constellation of Sculptor, the cartwheel shape of this galaxy is the result of a violent galactic collision. A smaller galaxy has passed right through a large disk galaxy and produced shock waves that swept up gas and dust — much like the ripples produced when a stone is dropped into a lake — and sparked regions of intense star formation (appearing blue). The outermost ring of the galaxy, which is 1.5 times the size of our Milky Way, marks the shock wave’s leading edge. This object is one of the most dramatic examples of the small class of ring galaxies.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures a small portion of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The SMC is a dwarf galaxy and one of the Milky Way’s nearest neighbors, lying only about 200,000 light-years from Earth. It makes a pair with the Large Magellanic Cloud, and both objects are best seen from the Southern Hemisphere, but are visible from some northern latitudes as well.
The Small Magellanic Cloud contains hundreds of millions of stars, but this image focuses on just a small fraction of them. These stars comprise the open cluster NGC 376, which has a total mass only about 3,400 times that of the Sun. Open clusters, as the name suggests, are loosely bound and sparsely populated. This distinguishes open clusters from globular clusters, which generally appear as a continuous blur of starlight at their centers because they are so crammed with stars. In the case of NGC 376, individual stars are clearly discernable even in the most densely populated parts of this image.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA, A. Nota, G. De Marchi
#NASA #NASAMarshall #NASAGoddard #ESA #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #astrophysics #galaxy #SmallMagellanicCloud #dwarfgalaxy
This stunning image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy NGC 5643 in the constellation of Lupus (the Wolf). Looking this good isn’t easy; 30 different exposures, for a total of nine hours of observation time, together with the high resolution and clarity of Hubble, were needed to produce an image of such high level of detail and beauty.
NGC 5643 is about 60 million light-years away from Earth and has been the host of a recent supernova event (not visible in this latest image). This supernova (2017cbv) was a specific type in which a white dwarf steals so much mass from a companion star that it becomes unstable and explodes. The explosion releases significant amounts of energy and lights up that part of the galaxy.
The observation was proposed by Adam Riess, who (alongside Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt) was awarded a Nobel Prize in physics in 2011 for his contributions to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al.; acknowledgment: Mahdi Zamani
#NASA #MarshallSpaceFlightCenter #MSFC #Marshall #HubbleSpaceTelescope #HST #astronomy #space #astrophysics #solarsystemandbeyond #gsfc #Goddard #GoddardSpaceFlightCenter #ESA #EuropeanSpaceAgency #galaxy
Galaxies come in many shapes and sizes. One of the key galaxy types we see in the universe is the spiral galaxy, as demonstrated in an especially beautiful way by the subject of this Hubble Space Telescope image, NGC 2985. NGC 2985 lies over 70 million light-years from the solar system in the constellation of Ursa Major (the Great Bear).
The intricate, near-perfect symmetry on display here reveals the incredible complexity of NGC 2985. Multiple tightly wound spiral arms widen as they whirl outward from the galaxy’s bright core, slowly fading and dissipating until these majestic structures disappear into the emptiness of intergalactic space, bringing a beautiful end to their starry splendor.
Over eons, spiral galaxies tend to run into other galaxies, often resulting in mergers. These coalescing events scramble the winding structures of the original galaxies, smoothing and rounding their shape. These objects possess a beauty all their own, distinct from the spiral galaxies from whence they came.
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Ho
I have recently published an article on narrowband imaging, and creating Hubble Palette astrophotography images.
This post should be useful for those looking to get into this type of imaging - as it took me quite a while to get up to speed on the subject myself!
astrobackyard.com/narrowband-imaging/
Here is Melotte 15 inside of the Heart Nebula in SHO (SII, Ha, OIII)
The Prawn Nebula is located in the Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way, in the constellation Scorpius. Other names include both IC 4628, and Gum 56. From our vantage point, it is about 6,000 light-years away. IC 4628 is an extensive stellar nursery containing a large number of very hot, luminous, young stars created from the surrounding gases.
The nebula is about 250 light-years in diameter, with an apparent size of 1.5 degrees. For reference, this would cover an area three to four times the size of the moon. With my instrument, the full moon will fill my sensor. Unfortunately, I can’t fit the entire complex within this image.
Gum 56 is very faint and emits light at wavelengths not visible to our eyes. Two luminous giants and several young stars in this nebula emit an incredible amount of ultraviolet radiation ionising the hydrogen gas. The result, it glows. Within this invisibility, many things are concealed. Material ejected from violent supernova in the past provides new materials that allow for the formation of new stars. The cycle of stellar life and death continues as dust and gases collapse down, forming new stars.
The photo presented is a narrowband image created by combining filtered light from SII, Ha, and OIII filters. It allows us to reveal details of objects that we cannot see easily, or not at all. Often, the results can be very striking and dramatic. I tried to retain that pleasing gradient of yellow golds, through bands of teal, and hues of blue found in a traditional Hubble Palette image. I was pleased with the star colours ranging from blue to red, using only the narrowband filters. These colours appear very different from a traditional true colour image constructed with red, green, blue filtered light.
Instruments:
• 10 Inch RCOS fl 9.1
• Astro Physics AP-900 Mount
• SBIG STL 11000m
• FLI Filter Wheel
• Baader Planetarium H-alpha 7nm Narrowband-Filter
• Baader Planetarium OIII 8.5nm Narrowband-Filter
• Baader Planetarium SII 8.0nm Narrowband-Filter
Exposure Details:
• SII 22 X 1800
• Ha 22 X 1800
• OIII 24 X 1800
Total Exposure Time: 34.0 Hours
The jellyfish galaxy JW39 hangs serenely in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This galaxy lies over 900 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices, and is one of several jellyfish galaxies that Hubble has been studying over the past two years.
Despite this jellyfish galaxy’s serene appearance, it is adrift in a ferociously hostile environment; a galaxy cluster. Compared to their more isolated counterparts, the galaxies in galaxy clusters are often distorted by the gravitational pull of larger neighbours, which can twist galaxies into a variety of weird and wonderful shapes. If that was not enough, the space between galaxies in a cluster is also pervaded with a searingly hot plasma known as the intracluster medium. While this plasma is extremely tenuous, galaxies moving through it experience it almost like swimmers fighting against a current, and this interaction can strip galaxies of their star-forming gas.
This interaction between the intracluster medium and the galaxies is called ram-pressure stripping, and is the process responsible for the trailing tendrils of this jellyfish galaxy. As JW39 has moved through the cluster the pressure of the intracluster medium has stripped away gas and dust into long trailing ribbons of star formation that now stretch away from the disc of the galaxy.
Astronomers using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 studied these trailing tendrils in detail, as they are a particularly extreme environment for star formation. Surprisingly, they found that star formation in the ‘tentacles’ of jellyfish galaxies was not noticeably different from star formation in the galaxy disc.
[Image Description: A spiral galaxy. It is large in the centre with a lot of detail visible. The core glows brightly and is surrounded by concentric rings of dark and light dust. The spiral arms are thick and puffy with grey dust and glowing blue areas of star formation. They wrap around the galaxy to form a ring. Part of the arm is drawn out into a dark thread above the galaxy, and dust from the arm trails off to the right.]
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Gullieuszik and the GASP team CC BY 4.0
ABELL 2151
3zObservatory deep field
Con il socio Giorgio Mazzacurati abbiamo deciso di omaggiare i 30 anni dell'Hubble space telescope scimmiottando una delle più belle foto che ha fatto il telescopio spaziale.
L'Ammasso di Ercole (Abell 2151) è un ammasso di galassie situato nell'omonima costellazione alla distanza di oltre un miliardo di anni luce dalla Terra.
È inserito nel Catalogo Abell redatto nel 1958 ed ha una classe di ricchezza 2, in quanto formato da 129 galassie. È un ammasso di tipo III secondo la classificazione di Bautz-Morgan in quanto contiene anche numerose galassie spirali. Inoltre sono presenti diverse galassie interagenti. (fonte wiki)
Composizione LRGB circa 6h ore di integrazione a bin2
Strumentazione:
RC12GSO su EQ8
CCD G24000-Astrodon Filter LRGB - OA Starlight
Elaborazione tramite Pixinsight/Photoshop
Autori: Paolo Zampolini e Giorgio Mazzacurati @3zObservatory