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This image of M8 demonstrates the three emission bands Ha, OIII and SII and maps the location of those emissions in equal measure. It is quite different from the 2013 bi-colour image which was Oxygen dominate in the mix.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07k054z/p07jzyg6?fbclid=IwAR0rG...
© and processing Paul C Swift 2019
Data Theodore Arampatzoglou 2013
#hubble #hubbletelescope #nasa #esa #space #espacio #universe #universo #galaxy #galaxia #nebula #nebulosa #photography #fotografia #astronomy #astronomia #astrophotography #astrofotografia #cosmos #science #ciencia #star #estrella #stars #estrellas #universetoday #hubble #telescope #telescopio
I've told Sam
That I was her fan
and she told me:
Tuta, the reason that they're pointing west at this time of the day, is to send some cool air home.
It works like an air conditioner,
a giant air conditioner.
And I believed her.
And I became a fan.
NEWS ARTICLE:
www.caller2.com/2000/august/14/today/texas_me/1885.html
Worked with scanning technician Mr. Lee Lawrence of P&Q Photo Hollywood California trying to figure out the color embedded in the 35mm Fuji Superia ISO 800 negative, and our research proved miraculously rewarding!! low latitude rare aurora during solar maximum aug 12, 2000 from a coronal mass ejection on approx Aug 9/10. Negative scanned by Graytone.com in 2002 with Isomet 405HR drum scanner with high dynamic range sensitivity. Atomic nitrogen glowing blue at 1000km as confirmed by physicist Neil Davis. Pink oxygen emissions and Perseid Meteor crashing thru due to simultaneous meteor shower that night at 4am 12 Aug 2000. Scanned by P & Q Photo, 6660 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood, California.
ROCKET TRAIL PHOTO OF GLOWING COLORS IN THE STRATOSPHERE by Flickr member Angel Villanueva
I may never come down--galaxy collisions are rad!!!
View it LARGE.
Sorry I haven't been around much. I found the coolest web ever and decided to make my own Hubble Space Telescope following their instructions: The Hubble Site
I wanted to celebrate 18 years of the Hubble Space Telescope (April 24, 1990 - April 24, 2008) and go see all the galaxy collisions in person after they released 59 new photos for the Anniversary event.
I decided to bring along my peace sign in case I run into any unfriendly space creatures. I'm also using my spacecraft/telescope to further my politcal campaigning with George Clooney...I hope we can get the Alien Vote.
Do you see all the cool things I do like a sea turtle and a heart? Gotta go, my pal Gazoo wants to go chase after that cosmic jelly fish....
Music To Watch Space Boys By ~ Leonard Nimoy
p.s. My sleek spacesuit is the latest in technology and is made out of nylon and spandex and is called Biofit. It relies on mechanical counter-pressure instead of using gas pressurization. It'll be another 10 years until humans can wear them, but I can now, cuz Blythes are light years ahead of humans.
**************************************************
Assorted cosmic collisions from NASA
Video link to 4K UHD youtu.be/g2LJYiptwR0
flickr video link flic.kr/p/26D3xFa
Last week on Friday 1 June and the first official day of Winter here in
Australia, I decided to attempt a Hubble Space Telescope Solar Transit.
The Sun has been very quiet lately, but I did notice over the last week or so there was a possibility of capturing Hubble crossing near a small active region (AR2712).
Now Hubble is only about the size of a bus and given it was extremely far away, I was wondering how I might fair this time around capturing the transit at 60 frames per second.
Given the Sun is so bright, I couldn't see anything and I always dare not look directly into the Sun, so I used a clock and timing to capture the transit.
When I arrived home, I was very excited to see the transit path of a very tiny dot (Hubble) which was traveling at high speed across the the Sun's surface and quite close to AR2712!
HST Transit Information was Provided by ‘Calsky’ www.calsky.com
Image was captured using Canon Equipment and composited from approximately 80 frames to show the transit path.
Canon EOS-1D X Mark II
Canon 800 mm L IS USM
Orion Solar Filter
NASA Hubble Space Telescope 1 June 2018 - 13h19m15.00s
Crosses the disk of the Sun next to Solar Sunspot Region AR2712
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Satellite at Azimuth=333.2° NNW Altitude 35.6°
Transit duration 1.32s. Visible Path width 12.8 km
Angular Diameter of HST (20580 1990-037-B) 3.31"
Cylindrical Size 13.3m x 4.3m
Distance 870.7 km Angular Velocity 23.9'/s
Ground Speed=7.742 km/s (27,800 km/h)
johnsastrophotos From last night
Bottom left LDN1622, center M78, upper right NGC2024 and B33
70-300 second images
ZWO ASI6200MC
Antlia duel band filter
250mm f4.9 Red Cat telescope
Hubble Captures a Drifting Galaxy
A large spiral galaxy is seen at center. Its core surrounded by concentric rings of dark and light dust. Its spiral arms hold grey dust and blue areas of star formation. Part of the arm is drawn out above the galaxy. Dust from the arm trails off to the right.
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 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 neighbors, which can twist galaxies into a variety of 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 moved through the cluster, the pressure of the intracluster medium stripped away gas and dust into long trailing ribbons of star formation that now stretch away from the disk 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 disk.
Text credit: European Space Agency (ESA)
Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, M. Gullieuszik and the GASP team
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
Last Updated: May 26, 2023
Editor: Andrea Gianopoulos
"Swift and Faco go crazy trying to image tiny objects" Backyard
Thank you for looking at NGC 6826 (also known as Caldwell 15) is a planetary nebula located in the constellation Cygnus. It is commonly referred to as the "blinking planetary"
Technical card
Imaging telescope: RC 410mm f7.8 customed
Imaging camera: Apogee Aspin GG16m
Mount: RM500 customed
Guiding system: Orion SteadyStar + Lodestar
Filters: Baader LRGB set
#hubble #hubbletelescope #nasa #esa #space #espacio #universe #universo #galaxy #galaxia #nebula #nebulosa #photography #fotografia #astronomy #astronomia #astrophotography #astrofotografia #cosmos #science #ciencia #star #estrella #stars #estrellas #universetoday #hubble #telescope #telescopio
My version of NGC 1309.
Made with FIT's data from Hubble Space Telescope.
Follow me on social media for latest:
Website: www.bt-photography.co.uk
Instagram: www.instagram.com/bt_photo
Facebook: www.facebook.com/BrianTomlinsonPhotography
Image attribution: NASA / ESA / CSA / Brian Tomlinson
Recent Lightroom edit of a shot from my 2013 Rt 66 Road Trip. Marshfield, MO Quarter Scale Model of Hubble Telescope. The Hubble Telescope was named in honor of Edwin Powell Hubble, an astronomer from Marshfield.
| A Bristle in the heart of the Heart |
Cosmic clouds form fantastic shapes in the central regions of emission nebula IC 1805. The clouds are sculpted by stellar winds and radiation from massive hot stars in the nebula's newborn star cluster, Melotte 15. About 1.5 million years young, the cluster stars are toward the right in this colorful skyscape, along with dark dust clouds in silhouette against glowing atomic gas. A composite of narrowband and broadband telescopic images, the view spans about 30 light-years and includes emission from ionized hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen atoms mapped to green, red, and blue hues in the popular Hubble Palette.
Took just over 2 months since the commencement of the first sub-exposure!
Tried out a new processing workflow which was meant bring more emphasis on the dark and central gas structures while keeping the highlights toned down. I made a few variants of the Hubble palette but eventually settled on the good ol' traditional Hubble Palette colour grading. I finally created my own Luminance layering technique, which also brought out the sharp and cripsy details in the dark nebula region. The use of good masks were crucial for selective sharpening of the Luminance layer while the final layering was done traditionally in Photoshop CS 6.
Imaged from Central London
122 x 180s Ha
41 x 180s Oiii
80 x 180s S2
Scope/Lens: Skywatcher Quattro Series 8" F/4 newtonian
Camera: QHY 294M-pro
Mount: Skywatcher AZ-EQ6 GT
Edited in Pixinsight and final tuches in Photoshop CS6.
Hope you enjoy it and Clear Skies!
A closer more detailed single composite image showing the Lunar transit path of HST, as well as where Lunar X and Lunar V are located.
Here is the link to the video version flic.kr/p/26pvTiA
For the best video viewing experience in 4K UHD, please see the Youtube 4K UHD Video link at youtu.be/9GxZesAq53o
This is my first capture of the Hubble Space Telescope crossing in front of the Moon!
The transit was across the Waxing Gibbous Moon (52.3%) and Hubble also crossed directly between Lunar X and Lunar V which are both present near the terminator on the Lunar surface.
Lunar X and Lunar V can appear a few times a year and in various places around the world when the Earth is in the right position to view ideal Sunlight on the Moon.
The phenomenon occurs when the Moon is near First Quarter phase, Lunar X lasts about 4 hours while Lunar V stays visible a bit longer after Lunar X fades away.
HST Transit Information Provided by ‘Calsky’ www.calsky.com
Footage was captured using Canon Equipment
Canon EOS 1DX Mark II
Canon EF 800mm f/5.6L IS USM Lens
Canon EF 400mm f/2.8L IS USM Lens
Approximately 140 frames composited to one image showing the transit path of the Hubble Space Telescope.
Hubble Space Telescope 22 May 2018 - 18h25m32.40s.
Crosses the Waxing Gibbous Moon (52.3%).
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Satellite at Azimuth 356.2° N Altitude 48.4°
Transit Duration: 0.92s, Visible Path Width: 9.05 km
Diameter of HST: 4.18" (Magnitude 2.2 mag)
Distance 703.5 km Angular Velocity 34.1 '/s
Ground speed 7.267 km/s (27,600 km/h)
NGC 6188: Fighting Dragons of Ara
Deep in the skies above a light polluted city, nobody knew what was going on in this patch of the sky..till John Herschel discovered this in 1836. With his 18 1/4” reflector, he noted a “faint nebula, in which the preceding part of the cluster is involved”. .
NGC 6188 is actually in emission nebula located approximately 4,000 light years away in the constellation of Ara (thus the name) Its bright open star cluster NGC 6193 is in fact visible to the naked eye. .
Bottom right of the picture is another emission nebula, NGC 6164-5. Expelled gaseous material from the centre star possibly due to its fast rotation led to this symmetric shape of this bi-polar nebula. It diameter spans 4 light years across.
And it looks like the dragon on the right is guarding this egg from the dragon on the left 🐲
A total of 38 hours worth of exposures went into this beautiful widefield image of the Dragons, keep looking up to the night skies!
Postcard with view from the Hubble Telescope of a "Celestial Butterfly", also known as Sharpless 2-106 in outer space.
Sent by a Postcrosser in the United States.
Hubble Catches Jupiter's Largest Moon Going to the 'Dark Side'
HST/WFPC2 Image of Jupiter and Ganymede Taken April 9, 2007
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has caught Jupiter's moon Ganymede playing a game of "peek-a-boo." In this crisp Hubble image, Ganymede is shown just before it ducks behind the giant planet.
Ganymede completes an orbit around Jupiter every seven days. Because Ganymede's orbit is tilted nearly edge-on to Earth, it routinely can be seen passing in front of and disappearing behind its giant host, only to reemerge later.
Composed of rock and ice, Ganymede is the largest moon in our solar system. It is even larger than the planet Mercury. But Ganymede looks like a dirty snowball next to Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. Jupiter is so big that only part of its Southern Hemisphere can be seen in this image.
Hubble's view is so sharp that astronomers can see features on Ganymede's surface, most notably the white impact crater, Tros, and its system of rays, bright streaks of material blasted from the crater. Tros and its ray system are roughly the width of Arizona.
The image also shows Jupiter's Great Red Spot, the large eye-shaped feature at upper left. A storm the size of two Earths, the Great Red Spot has been raging for more than 300 years. Hubble's sharp view of the gas giant planet also reveals the texture of the clouds in the Jovian atmosphere as well as various other storms and vortices.
Astronomers use these images to study Jupiter's upper atmosphere. As Ganymede passes behind the giant planet, it reflects sunlight, which then passes through Jupiter's atmosphere. Imprinted on that light is information about the gas giant's atmosphere, which yields clues about the properties of Jupiter's high-altitude haze above the cloud tops.
This color image was made from three images taken on April 9, 2007, with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in red, green, and blue filters. The image shows Jupiter and Ganymede in close to natural colors.
For additional information go to:
hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2008/42/
Credit: NASA, ESA, and E. Karkoschka (University of Arizona)
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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This colorful image, taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, celebrates the Earth-orbiting observatory’s 28th anniversary of viewing the heavens, giving us a window seat to the universe’s extraordinary tapestry of stellar birth and destruction.
At the center of the photo, a monster young star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust.
This mayhem is all happening at the heart of the Lagoon Nebula, a vast stellar nursery located 4,000 light-years away and visible in binoculars simply as a smudge of light with a bright core.
The giant star, called Herschel 36, is bursting out of its natal cocoon of material, unleashing blistering radiation and torrential stellar winds (streams of subatomic particles) that push dust away in curtain-like sheets. This action resembles the Sun bursting through the clouds at the end of an afternoon thunderstorm that showers sheets of rainfall.
Herschel 36’s violent activity has blasted holes in the bubble-shaped cloud, allowing astronomers to study this action-packed stellar breeding ground.
The hefty star is 32 times more massive and 40,000 times hotter than our Sun. It is nearly nine times our Sun’s diameter. Herschel 36 is still very active because it is young by a star’s standards, only 1 million years old. Based on its mass, it will live for another 5 million years. In comparison, our smaller Sun is 5 billion years old and will live another 5 billion years.
This region epitomizes a typical, raucous stellar nursery full of birth and destruction. The clouds may look majestic and peaceful, but they are in a constant state of flux from the star’s torrent of searing radiation and high-speed particles from stellar winds. As the monster star throws off its natal cocoon of material with its powerful energy, it is suppressing star formation around it.
However, at the dark edges of this dynamic bubble-shaped ecosystem, stars are forming within dense clouds of gas and dust. Dark, elephant-like “trunks” of material represent dense pieces of the cocoon that are resistant to erosion by the searing ultraviolet light and serve as incubators for fledgling stars. They are analogous to desert buttes that resist weather erosion.
The Hubble view shows off the bubble’s 3D structure. Dust pushed away from the star reveals the glowing oxygen gas (in blue) behind the blown-out cavity. Herschel 36’s brilliant light is illuminating the top of the cavity (in yellow). The reddish hue that dominates part of the region is glowing nitrogen. The dark purple areas represent a mixture of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.
The image shows a region of the nebula measuring about 4 light-years across.
The observations were taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 between Feb. 12 and Feb. 18, 2018.
For more information on Hubble’s observations of M8, see:
hubblesite.org/image/4150/news_release/2018-21
Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI
Perks of not going out on weekdays.... Access and process images from hubble.
NGC 6621/NGC 6622 (Arp 81) - A beautiful peculiar pair of interacting galaxies. This image is a result of collision that occurred around 100 million years after their closest approach. It consists of NGC 6621 (to the left) and NGC 6622 (to the right).
NGC 6621 is the larger of the two, and is a very disturbed spiral galaxy. The encounter has pulled a long tail out of NGC 6621 that has now wrapped behind its body. The collision has also triggered extensive star formation between the two galaxies.
Scientists believe that Arp 81 has a richer collection of young massive star clusters than the notable Antennae galaxies (which are much closer than Arp 81). The pair is located in the constellation of Draco, approximately 300 million light-years away from Earth.
Arp 81 is the 81st galaxy in Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. This image is part of a large collection of 59 images of merging galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released on the occasion of its 18th anniversary on 24th April 2008. About the object Object name NGC 6621, NGC 6622, VV 247, Arp 81, VII Zw 778, KPG 534A Object description Interacting Galaxies Position (J2000) 18 12 54.70 +68 21 49.0 Constellation Draco Distance 300 million light-years (100 million parsecs)
About the data Data description The Hubble image was created using HST data from hla.stsci.edu/hlaview.html Instrument WFPC2 Exposure date(s) March 15, 1999 Exposure time 1.4 hours Filters F435W (B) and F814W (I).
Processed using FITS Liberator and Photoshop CC
Image showing a picture of the Hubble Telescope that among many others can be viewed at the the Ars Electronica Center’s Deep Space 8K with 16 by 9 meters wall and floor projections.
Ars Electronica Center Linz
Ars-Electronica-Straße 1
4040 Linz
Austria
Credit: Ars Electronica / Christopher Sonnleitner
In the Ars Electronica Center’s Deep Space 8K visitors can not only enjoy interactive flights in 3-D through the universe but also look at high resolution images of the Hubble telescope.
A best of Ars Electronica photos can be found here.
Ars Electronica Center Linz
Ars-Electronica-Straße 1
4040 Linz
Austria
Credit: Ars Electronica / Robert Bauernhansl
Hubble is only about the size of a school bus!
Youtube 4K UHD Video link youtu.be/9GxZesAq53o
Single image link flic.kr/p/268EPsP
This is my first capture of the the Hubble Space Telescope crossing in front of the Moon!
The transit was across the Waxing Gibbous Moon (52.3%) and Hubble also crossed directly between Lunar X and Lunar V which are both present near the terminator on the Lunar surface.
Lunar X and Lunar V can appear a few times a year and in various places around the world when the Earth is in the right position to view ideal Sunlight on the Moon.
The phenomenon occurs when the Moon is near First Quarter phase, Lunar X lasts about 4 hours while Lunar V stays visible a bit longer after Lunar X fades away.
HST Transit Information Provided by ‘Calsky’ www.calsky.com
Photo Credit: NASA/ESA for the 2008 Hubble in Orbit Image
www.spacetelescope.org/images/ann0814/
Footage was captured using Canon Equipment
Canon EOS 1DX Mark II
Canon EF 800mm f/5.6L IS USM Lens
Canon EF 400mm f/2.8L IS USM Lens
Hubble Space Telescope 22 May 2018 - 18h25m32.40s.
Crosses the Waxing Gibbous Moon (52.3%).
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Satellite at Azimuth 356.2° N Altitude 48.4°
Transit Duration: 0.92s, Visible Path Width: 9.05 km
Diameter of HST: 4.18" (Magnitude 2.2 mag)
Distance 703.5 km Angular Velocity 34.1 '/s
Ground speed 7.267 km/s (27,600 km/h)
Description: This image of Abell 1689 is a composite of data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple) and the Hubble Space Telescope (yellow). Abell 1689 is a massive cluster of galaxies that shows signs of merging activity. The long arcs in the optical image, the largest system of such arcs ever found, are caused by gravitational lensing of the background galaxies by matter in the galaxy cluster. Further studies of this cluster are needed to explain the lack of agreement between mass estimates based on the X-ray data and on the gravitational lensing.
Creator/Photographer: Chandra X-ray Observatory
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999, is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory built to date. The mirrors on Chandra are the largest, most precisely shaped and aligned, and smoothest mirrors ever constructed. Chandra is helping scientists better understand the hot, turbulent regions of space and answer fundamental questions about origin, evolution, and destiny of the Universe. The images Chandra makes are twenty-five times sharper than the best previous X-ray telescope. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Medium: Chandra telescope x-ray
Date: 2008
Persistent URL: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2008/a1689/
Repository: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Gift line: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/E.-H Peng et al.; Optical: NASA/STScI
Accession number: a1689
Image showing a picture of the Hubble Telescope that among many others can be viewed at the Ars Electronica Center’s Deep Space 8K with 16 by 9 meters wall and floor projections.
Ars Electronica Center Linz
Ars-Electronica-Straße 1
4040 Linz
Austria
credit: Ars Electronica / Christopher Sonnleitner
Release Date: July 10, 2003
A rich starry sky fills the view from an ancient gas-giant planet in the core of the globular star cluster M4, as imagined in this artist's concept. The 13-billion-year-old planet orbits a helium white-dwarf star and the millisecond pulsar B1620-26, seen at lower left. The globular cluster is deficient in heavier elements for making planets, so the existence of such a world implies that planet formation may have been quite efficient and common in the early universe.
Object Names: B1620-26, M4
Image Type: Artwork
Illustration Credit: NASA and G. Bacon (STScI)
To learn more about this image go to:
www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2003/0709hstss...
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is home to the nation's largest organization of combined scientists, engineers and technologists that build spacecraft, instruments and new technology to study the Earth, the sun, our solar system, and the universe.
Appearing like a winged fairy-tale creature poised on a pedestal, this object is actually a billowing tower of cold gas and dust rising from a stellar nursery called the Eagle Nebula. The soaring tower is 9.5 light-years or about 57 trillion miles high, about twice the distance from our Sun to the next nearest star.
Stars in the Eagle Nebula are born in clouds of cold hydrogen gas that reside in chaotic neighborhoods, where energy from young stars sculpts fantasy-like landscapes in the gas. The tower may be a giant incubator for those newborn stars. A torrent of ultraviolet light from a band of massive, hot, young stars (off the top of the image) is eroding the pillar.
The starlight also is responsible for illuminating the tower's rough surface. Ghostly streamers of gas can be seen boiling off this surface, creating the haze around the structure and highlighting its three-dimensional shape. The column is silhouetted against the background glow of more distant gas.
The edge of the dark hydrogen cloud at the top of the tower is resisting erosion, in a manner similar to that of brush among a field of prairie grass that is being swept up by fire. The fire quickly burns the grass but slows down when it encounters the dense brush. In this celestial case, thick clouds of hydrogen gas and dust have survived longer than their surroundings in the face of a blast of ultraviolet light from the hot, young stars.
Inside the gaseous tower, stars may be forming. Some of those stars may have been created by dense gas collapsing under gravity. Other stars may be forming due to pressure from gas that has been heated by the neighboring hot stars.
The first wave of stars may have started forming before the massive star cluster began venting its scorching light. The star birth may have begun when denser regions of cold gas within the tower started collapsing under their own weight to make stars.
The bumps and fingers of material in the center of the tower are examples of these stellar birthing areas. These regions may look small but they are roughly the size of our solar system. The fledgling stars continued to grow as they fed off the surrounding gas cloud. They abruptly stopped growing when light from the star cluster uncovered their gaseous cradles, separating them from their gas supply.
Ironically, the young cluster's intense starlight may be inducing star formation in some regions of the tower. Examples can be seen in the large, glowing clumps and finger-shaped protrusions at the top of the structure. The stars may be heating the gas at the top of the tower and creating a shock front, as seen by the bright rim of material tracing the edge of the nebula at top left. As the heated gas expands, it acts like a battering ram, pushing against the darker cold gas. The intense pressure compresses the gas, making it easier for stars to form. This scenario may continue as the shock front moves slowly down the tower.
The dominant colors in the image were produced by gas energized by the star cluster's powerful ultraviolet light. The blue color at the top is from glowing oxygen. The red color in the lower region is from glowing hydrogen. The Eagle Nebula image was taken in November 2004 with the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
For more information please visit:
hubblesite.org/image/1693/news_release/2005-12
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Multiwavelength View of Supernova 1987A
Astronomers combined observations from three different observatories to produce this colorful, multiwavelength image of the intricate remains of Supernova 1987A.
The red color shows newly formed dust in the center of the supernova remnant, taken at submillimeter wavelengths by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile.
The green and blue hues reveal where the expanding shock wave from the exploded star is colliding with a ring of material around the supernova. The green represents the glow of visible light, captured by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The blue color reveals the hottest gas and is based on data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
The ring was initially made to glow by the flash of light from the original explosion. Over subsequent years the ring material has brightened considerably as the explosion’s shock wave slams in it.
Supernova 1987A resides 163,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, where a firestorm of star birth is taking place.
The ALMA, Hubble, and Chandra images at the bottom of the graphic were used to make up the multiwavelength view.
Credits
Image credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Angelich (NRAO/AUI/NSF)
Hubble credit: NASA, ESA, and R. Kirshner (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation)
Chandra credit: NASA/CXC/Penn State/K. Frank et al.
ALMA credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO) and R. Indebetouw (NRAO/AUI/NSF)
Description: Chandra's X-ray image (blue) combined with Hubble's optical image (red and green) reveal towering filaments of warm (about ten thousand degrees Celsius) and hot (about ten million degrees Celsius) gas that blend to create the bright horseshoe-shaped feature near the center. This feature is thought to have been formed when a superwind of hot gas collided with cold gas in the galactic disk. The full extent of the superwind shows up as a fainter conical cloud of X-ray emission surrounding the filaments. Superwinds originate in the centers of galaxies either from activity generated by supermassive black holes, or by bursts of supernova activity.
Creator/Photographer: Chandra X-ray Observatory
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999, is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory built to date. The mirrors on Chandra are the largest, most precisely shaped and aligned, and smoothest mirrors ever constructed. Chandra is helping scientists better understand the hot, turbulent regions of space and answer fundamental questions about origin, evolution, and destiny of the Universe. The images Chandra makes are twenty-five times sharper than the best previous X-ray telescope. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Medium: Chandra telescope x-ray
Date: 2003
Repository: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Gift line: NASA/CXC/STScI/U.North Carolina/G.Cecil
Accession number: ngc3079
Astronomers used the Hubble Space telescope to revisit one of its most iconic subjects, the so-called "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula (M16). Three towers of gas and dust, standing light-years tall, are giving birth to new stars, buried within their dusty spires.
The pillars became famous after Hubble first imaged them in 1995 using the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. The features were observed again in late 2014 with that instrument's more advanced replacement, the Wide Field Camera 3. With its higher resolution, the new camera provides a sharper view of the pillars and also presents a wider vista, showing the base of the pillars and more of the region surrounding them.
In addition, the new observations captured a portrait of the pillars in infrared light, as well as in visible light. The longer wavelengths of infrared light pass more easily through the dusty environs, allowing us to see more of the wispy details and the stars normally hidden inside or behind the pillars when viewed in visible light.
By comparing Hubble's original image of the pillars to the new one, astronomers also noticed changes in a jet-like feature shooting away from one of the newborn stars within the pillars. The jet grew 60 billion miles longer in the time between observations, suggesting material in the jet was traveling at a speed of about 450,000 miles per hour.
Such observations of the details and changes in the pillars of the Eagle Nebula, and of observations near and far throughout the universe, have been made possible by Hubble’s viewpoint beyond Earth's atmosphere, by its technical upgrades over the years, and the longevity of its career.
For more information please visit:
hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2015/news-2015-01.html
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
The composite picture is a seamless blend of ultra-sharp Hubble Space Telescope images combined with the wide view of the Mosaic Camera on the National Science Foundation's 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona.
Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute assembled these images into a mosaic. The mosaic was then blended with a wider photograph taken by the Mosaic Camera. The image shows a fine web of filamentary "bicycle-spoke" features embedded in the colorful red and blue gas ring, which is one of the nearest planetary nebulae to Earth.
Because the nebula is nearby, it appears as nearly one-half the diameter of the full Moon. This required Hubble astronomers to take several exposures with the Advanced Camera for Surveys to capture most of the Helix. Hubble views were then blended with a wider photo taken by the Mosaic Camera. The portrait offers a dizzying look down what is actually a trillion-mile-long tunnel of glowing gases. The fluorescing tube is pointed nearly directly at Earth, so it looks more like a bubble than a cylinder. A forest of thousands of comet-like filaments, embedded along the inner rim of the nebula, points back toward the central star, which is a small, super-hot white dwarf.
The tentacles formed when a hot "stellar wind" of gas plowed into colder shells of dust and gas ejected previously by the doomed star. Ground-based telescopes have seen these comet-like filaments for decades, but never before in such detail. The filaments may actually lie in a disk encircling the hot star, like a collar. The radiant tie-die colors correspond to glowing oxygen (blue) and hydrogen and nitrogen (red).
Valuable Hubble observing time became available during the November 2002 Leonid meteor storm. To protect the spacecraft, including Hubble's precise mirror, controllers turned the aft end into the direction of the meteor stream for about half a day. Fortunately, the Helix Nebula was almost exactly in the opposite direction of the meteor stream, so Hubble used nine orbits to photograph the nebula while it waited out the storm. To capture the sprawling nebula, Hubble had to take nine separate snapshots.
Planetary nebulae like the Helix are sculpted late in a Sun-like star's life by a torrential gush of gases escaping from the dying star. They have nothing to do with planet formation, but got their name because they look like planetary disks when viewed through a small telescope. With higher magnification, the classic "doughnut-hole" in the middle of a planetary nebula can be resolved. Based on the nebula's distance of 650 light-years, its angular size corresponds to a huge ring with a diameter of nearly 3 light-years. That's approximately three-quarters of the distance between our Sun and the nearest star.
The Helix Nebula is a popular target of amateur astronomers and can be seen with binoculars as a ghostly, greenish cloud in the constellation Aquarius. Larger amateur telescopes can resolve the ring-shaped nebula, but only the largest ground-based telescopes can resolve the radial streaks. After careful analysis, astronomers concluded the nebula really isn't a bubble, but is a cylinder that happens to be pointed toward Earth.
For more information please visit:
hubblesite.org/image/1317/news_release/2003-11
Credit: NASA, NOAO, ESA, the Hubble Helix Nebula Team, M. Meixner (STScI), and T.A. Rector (NRAO)
This image taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope depicts bright, blue, newly formed stars that are blowing a cavity in the center of a star-forming region in the Small Magellanic Cloud.
At the heart of the star-forming region lies star cluster NGC 602. The high-energy radiation blazing out from the hot young stars is sculpting the inner edge of the outer portions of the nebula, slowly eroding it away and eating into the material beyond. The diffuse outer reaches of the nebula prevent the energetic outflows from streaming away from the cluster.
Ridges of dust and gaseous filaments are seen toward the northwest (in the upper-left part of the image) and toward the southeast (in the lower right corner). Elephant trunk-like dust pillars point towards the hot blue stars and are tell-tale signs of their eroding effect. In this region, it is possible with Hubble to trace how the star formation started at the center of the cluster and propagated outward, with the youngest stars still forming today along the dust ridges.
The Small Magellanic Cloud, in the constellation Tucana, is roughly 200,000 light-years from Earth. Its proximity to us makes it an exceptional laboratory to perform in-depth studies of star formation processes and their evolution in an environment slightly different from our own Milky Way.
Dwarf galaxies such as the Small Magellanic Cloud, with significantly fewer stars compared to our own galaxy, are considered to be the primitive building blocks of larger galaxies. The study of star formation within this dwarf galaxy is particularly interesting to astronomers because its primitive nature means that it lacks a large percentage of the heavier elements that are forged in successive generations of stars through nuclear fusion.
These observations were taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys in July 2004.
Filters that isolate visible and infrared light were combined with a filter that samples the hydrogen and nitrogen emission from the glowing clouds.
For more information please visit:
hubblesite.org/image/2042/news_release/2007-04
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) – ESA/Hubble Collaboration
For the best video viewing experience on a large screen in 4K UHD, please see the Youtube 4K UHD Video link at youtu.be/g2LJYiptwR0
flickr single image link flic.kr/p/27SmUFk
Last week on Friday 1 June and the first official day of Winter here in
Australia, I decided to attempt a Hubble Space Telescope Solar Transit.
The Sun has been very quiet lately, but I did notice over the last week or so there was a possibility of capturing Hubble crossing near a small active region (AR2712).
Now Hubble is only about the size of a bus and given it was extremely far away, I was wondering how I might fair this time around capturing the transit at 60 frames per second.
Given the Sun is so bright, I couldn't see anything and I always dare not look directly into the Sun, so I used a clock and timing to capture the transit.
When I arrived home, I was very excited to see the transit path of a very tiny dot (Hubble) which was traveling at high speed across the the Sun's surface and quite close to AR2712!
HST Transit Information was Provided by ‘Calsky’ www.calsky.com
Hubble in Orbit and Icarus images in the video are courtesy of NASA/ESA
Canon EOS-1D X Mark II
Canon 800 mm L IS USM
Orion Solar Filter
NASA Hubble Space Telescope 1 June 2018 - 13h19m15.00s
Crosses the disk of the Sun next to Solar Sunspot Region AR2712
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Satellite at Azimuth=333.2° NNW Altitude 35.6°
Transit duration 1.32s. Visible Path width 12.8 km
Angular Diameter of HST (20580 1990-037-B) 3.31"
Cylindrical Size 13.3m x 4.3m
Distance 870.7 km Angular Velocity 23.9'/s
Ground Speed=7.742 km/s (27,800 km/h)
Enhanced RGB with 4 filters (435, 555, 658 and 814) - zoom
M51 taken by Hubble telescope
Credit : ESA / NASA / S. Beckwith (STScI) / Hubble Heritage Team
Processing: Thomas Thomopoulos
This is one of the largest panoramic images ever taken with Hubble's cameras. It is a 50-light-year-wide view of the central region of the Carina Nebula where a maelstrom of star birth — and death — is taking place. Hubble's view of the nebula shows star birth in a new level of detail. The fantasy-like landscape of the nebula is sculpted by the action of outflowing winds and scorching ultraviolet radiation from the monster stars that inhabit this inferno. In the process, these stars are shredding the surrounding material that is the last vestige of the giant cloud from which the stars were born.
The immense nebula contains at least a dozen brilliant stars that are roughly estimated to be at least 50 to 100 times the mass of our Sun. The most unique and opulent inhabitant is the star Eta Carinae, at far left. Eta Carinae is in the final stages of its brief and eruptive lifespan, as evidenced by two billowing lobes of gas and dust that presage its upcoming explosion as a titanic supernova.
The fireworks in the Carina region started three million years ago when the nebula's first generation of newborn stars condensed and ignited in the middle of a huge cloud of cold molecular hydrogen. Radiation from these stars carved out an expanding bubble of hot gas. The island-like clumps of dark clouds scattered across the nebula are nodules of dust and gas that are resisting being eaten away by photoionization.
The hurricane blast of stellar winds and blistering ultraviolet radiation within the cavity is now compressing the surrounding walls of cold hydrogen. This is triggering a second stage of new star formation.
Our Sun and our solar system may have been born inside such a cosmic crucible 4.6 billion years ago. In looking at the Carina Nebula we are seeing the genesis of star making as it commonly occurs along the dense spiral arms of a galaxy.
The immense nebula is an estimated 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina the Keel (of the old southern constellation Argo Navis, the ship of Jason and the Argonauts, from Greek mythology).
This image is a mosaic of the Carina Nebula assembled from 48 frames taken with Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The Hubble images were taken in the light of neutral hydrogen. Color information was added with data taken at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Red corresponds to sulfur, green to hydrogen, and blue to oxygen emission.
For more information please visit:
hubblesite.org/image/2099/news_release/2007-16
Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); Credit for CTIO Image: N. Smith (University of California, Berkeley) and NOAO/AURA/NSF
Looking like an apparition rising from whitecaps of interstellar foam, the iconic Horsehead Nebula has graced astronomy books ever since its discovery over a century ago. The nebula is a favorite target for amateur and professional astronomers.
In this Hubble Space Telescope view, the nebula appears in a different light, as seen in infrared wavelengths. The nebula, shadowy in optical light, appears transparent and ethereal when seen in the infrared, represented here with visible shades. The rich tapestry of the Horsehead Nebula pops out against the backdrop of Milky Way stars and distant galaxies that are easily seen in infrared light.
The backlit wisps along the Horsehead's upper ridge are being illuminated by Sigma Orionis, a young five-star system just off the top of the Hubble image. A harsh ultraviolet glare from one of these bright stars is slowly evaporating the nebula. Along the nebula's top ridge, two fledgling stars peek out from their now-exposed nurseries.
Gas clouds surrounding the Horsehead have already dissipated, but the tip of the jutting pillar contains a slightly higher density of hydrogen and helium, laced with dust. This casts a shadow that protects material behind it from being photo-evaporated, and a pillar structure forms. Astronomers estimate that the Horsehead formation has about five million years left before it too disintegrates.
The Horsehead Nebula is part of a much larger complex in the constellation Orion. Known collectively as the Orion Molecular Cloud, it also houses other famous objects such as the Great Orion Nebula (M42), the Flame Nebula, and Barnard's Loop. At about 1,500 light-years away, this complex is one of the nearest and most easily photographed regions in which massive stars are being formed.
For more information, please visit:
hubblesite.org/image/3165/news_release/2013-12
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Seven TV stations, nine FM radio stations and three mobile cellular providers broadcast from the CN Tower in Toronto... into deep space! Is 'anyone' listening? This may surprise: www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/3390.html
This image has an early 1960's 'Telstar' kind of feel for me. At least that's what I ended up aiming for once I started working it in Photoshop. The starfield image is from NASA, taken by the Hubble Telescope.
This dramatic image offers a peek inside a cavern of roiling dust and gas where thousands of stars are forming. The image, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, represents the sharpest view ever taken of this region, called the Orion Nebula. More than 3,000 stars of various sizes appear in this image. Some of them have never been seen in visible light. These stars reside in a dramatic dust-and-gas landscape of plateaus, mountains, and valleys that are reminiscent of the Grand Canyon.
The Orion Nebula is a picture book of star formation, from the massive, young stars that are shaping the nebula to the pillars of dense gas that may be the homes of budding stars. The bright central region is the home of the four heftiest stars in the nebula. The stars are called the Trapezium because they are arranged in a trapezoid pattern. Ultraviolet light unleashed by these stars is carving a cavity in the nebula and disrupting the growth of hundreds of smaller stars. Located near the Trapezium stars are stars still young enough to have disks of material encircling them. These disks are called protoplanetary disks or "proplyds." The disks are the building blocks of solar systems.
The bright glow at upper left is from M43, a small region being shaped by a massive, young star's ultraviolet light. Astronomers call the region a miniature Orion Nebula because only one star is sculpting the landscape. The Orion Nebula has four such stars. Next to M43 are dense, dark pillars of dust and gas that point toward the Trapezium. These pillars are resisting erosion from the Trapezium's intense ultraviolet light. The glowing region on the right reveals arcs and bubbles formed when stellar winds — streams of charged particles ejected from the Trapezium stars — collide with material.
Faint reddish points near the bottom are brown dwarfs that Hubble spied for the first time in the nebula in visible light. Sometimes called "failed stars," brown dwarfs are cool objects that are too small to be ordinary stars because they cannot sustain nuclear fusion in their cores the way our Sun does. The dark red column, below left, shows an illuminated edge of the cavity wall.
The Orion Nebula is 1,500 light-years away, the nearest star-forming region to Earth. Astronomers used 520 Hubble images, taken in five colors, to make this picture. They also added ground-based photos to fill out the nebula. The ACS mosaic covers approximately the apparent angular size of the full moon.
The Orion observations were taken between 2004 and 2005.
For more information please visit: hubblesite.org/image/1826/news_release/2006-01
Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA), and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team
This celestial object looks like a delicate butterfly. But it is far from serene.
What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour — fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes!
A dying star that was once about five times the mass of the Sun is at the center of this fury. It has ejected its envelope of gases and is now unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that is making the cast-off material glow. This object is an example of a planetary nebula, so-named because many of them have a round appearance resembling that of a planet when viewed through a small telescope.
The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), the newest camera aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, snapped this image of the planetary nebula, cataloged as NGC 6302, but more popularly called the Bug Nebula or the Butterfly Nebula. WFC3 was installed by NASA astronauts in May 2009, during the last servicing mission to upgrade and repair Hubble.
NGC 6302 lies within our Milky Way Galaxy, roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. The glowing gas is the star's outer layers, expelled over about 2,200 years. The "butterfly" stretches for more than two light-years, which is about half the distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
The central star itself cannot be seen, because it is hidden within a doughnut-shaped ring of dust, which appears as a dark band pinching the nebula in the center. The thick dust belt constricts the star's outflow, creating the classic "bipolar" or hourglass shape displayed by some planetary nebulae.
The star's surface temperature is estimated to be about 400,000 degrees Fahrenheit, making it one of the hottest known stars in our galaxy. Spectroscopic observations made with ground-based telescopes show that the gas is roughly 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is unusually hot compared to a typical planetary nebula.
The WFC3 image reveals a complex history of ejections from the star. The star first evolved into a huge red-giant star, with a diameter of about 1,000 times that of our Sun. It then lost its extended outer layers. Some of this gas was cast off from its equator at a relatively slow speed, perhaps as low as 20,000 miles an hour, creating the doughnut-shaped ring. Other gas was ejected perpendicular to the ring at higher speeds, producing the elongated "wings" of the butterfly-shaped structure. Later, as the central star heated up, a much faster stellar wind, a stream of charged particles traveling at more than 2 million miles an hour, plowed through the existing wing-shaped structure, further modifying its shape.
The image also shows numerous finger-like projections pointing back to the star, which may mark denser blobs in the outflow that have resisted the pressure from the stellar wind.
The nebula's reddish outer edges are largely due to light emitted by nitrogen, which marks the coolest gas visible in the picture. WFC3 is equipped with a wide variety of filters that isolate light emitted by various chemical elements, allowing astronomers to infer properties of the nebular gas, such as its temperature, density, and composition.
The white-colored regions are areas where light is emitted by sulfur. These are regions where fast-moving gas overtakes and collides with slow-moving gas that left the star at an earlier time, producing shock waves in the gas (the bright white edges on the sides facing the central star). The white blob with the crisp edge at upper right is an example of one of those shock waves.
NGC 6302 was imaged on July 27, 2009, with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 in ultraviolet and visible light. Filters that isolate emissions from oxygen, helium, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulfur from the planetary nebula were used to create this composite image.
These Hubble observations of the planetary nebula NGC 6302 were part of the Hubble Servicing Mission 4 Early Release Observations.
For more information please visit:
hubblesite.org/image/2616/news_release/2009-25
See this link for an alternate near-ultraviolet to near-infrared view of the Butterfly Nebula, released in 2020: hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2020/news-2020-31?Y...
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
This Hubble Space Telescope image captures the chaotic activity atop a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks.
This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina.
Scorching radiation and fast winds (streams of charged particles) from super-hot newborn stars in the nebula are shaping and compressing the pillar, causing new stars to form within it. Streamers of hot ionized gas can be seen flowing off the ridges of the structure, and wispy veils of gas and dust, illuminated by starlight, float around its towering peaks. The denser parts of the pillar are resisting being eroded by radiation much like a towering butte in Utah's Monument Valley withstands erosion by water and wind.
Nestled inside this dense mountain are fledgling stars. Long streamers of gas can be seen shooting in opposite directions off the pedestal at the top of the image. A second pair of jets is visible at another peak near the center of the image. These jets (known as HH 901 and HH 902) are the signpost for new star birth. The jets are launched by swirling disks around the young stars, which allow material to slowly accrete onto the stars' surfaces.
Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 observed the pillar on February 1-2, 2010. The colors in this composite image correspond to the glow of oxygen (blue), hydrogen and nitrogen (green), and sulfur (red).
For more information please visit:
hubblesite.org/image/2707/news_release/2010-13
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
This is an image of MyCn18, a young planetary nebula located about 8,000 light-years away, taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. This Hubble image reveals the true shape of MyCn18 to be an hourglass with an intricate pattern of "etchings" in its walls. This picture has been composed from three separate images taken in the light of ionized nitrogen (represented by red), hydrogen (green), and doubly ionized oxygen (blue). The results are of great interest because they shed new light on the poorly understood ejection of stellar matter that accompanies the slow death of Sun-like stars. In previous ground-based images, MyCn18 appeared to be a pair of large outer rings with a smaller central one, but the fine details could not be seen.
According to one theory for the formation of planetary nebulae, the hourglass shape is produced by the expansion of a fast stellar wind within a slowly expanding cloud that is more dense near its equator than near its poles. What appears as a bright elliptical ring in the center, and at first sight might be mistaken for an equatorially dense region, is seen on closer inspection to be a potato-shaped structure with a symmetry axis dramatically different from that of the larger hourglass. The hot star that has been thought to eject and illuminate the nebula, and therefore expected to lie at its center of symmetry, is clearly off center. Hence MyCn18, as revealed by Hubble, does not fulfill some crucial theoretical expectations.
Hubble also revealed other features in MyCn18 that are completely new and unexpected. For example, there is a pair of intersecting elliptical rings in the central region, which appear to be the rims of a smaller hourglass. There are the intricate patterns of the etchings on the hourglass walls. The arc-like etchings could be the remnants of discrete shells ejected from the star when it was younger, or flow instabilities, or could result from the action of a narrow beam of matter impinging on the hourglass walls. An unseen companion star and accompanying gravitational effects may well be necessary in order to explain the structure of MyCn18.
For more information please visit:
hubblesite.org/image/397/news_release/1996-07
Credit: Raghvendra Sahai and John Trauger (JPL), the WFPC2 science team, and NASA
"Starry Night," Vincent van Gogh's famous painting, is renowned for its bold whorls of light sweeping across a raging night sky. Although that image of the heavens came only from the artist's restless imagination, a picture from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope bears remarkable similarities to the van Gogh work, complete with never-before-seen spirals of dust swirling across trillions of miles of interstellar space.
This image, obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on February 8, 2004, shows an expanding halo of light around a distant star named V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon). The illumination of interstellar dust comes from the red supergiant star at the middle of the image, which appeared to give off a flashbulb-like pulse of light in 2002. V838 Mon is located about 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Monoceros, placing the star at the outer edge of our Milky Way Galaxy.
Called a light echo, the expanding illumination of a dusty cloud around the star has been revealing remarkable structures ever since the star appeared to suddenly brighten for several weeks in early 2002. Though Hubble has followed the light echo in several snapshots, this image shows swirls or eddies in the dusty cloud for the first time. These eddies are probably caused by turbulence in the dust and gas around the star as they slowly expand away. The dust and gas were likely ejected from the star in a previous explosion, similar to the 2002 event, which occurred some tens of thousands of years ago. The surrounding dust remained invisible and unsuspected until suddenly illuminated by the brilliant explosion of the central star two years ago.
Hubble has imaged V838 Mon and its light echo several times since the star's observed outburst in January 2002, in order to follow the constantly changing appearance of the dust as the pulse of illumination continues to expand away from the star at the speed of light. During the outburst event, the normally faint star suddenly brightened, becoming 600,000 times more luminous than our Sun. It was thus one of the brightest stars in the entire Milky Way, until it faded away again in April 2002. The star has some similarities to a class of objects called "novae," which suddenly increase in brightness due to thermonuclear explosions at their surfaces; however, the detailed behavior of V838 Mon, in particular its extremely red color, has been completely different from any previously known nova.
Nature's own piece of performance art, this structure will continue to change its appearance as the light from the stellar outburst continues to propagate outward and bounce off more distant black clouds of dust.
For more information please visit: hubblesite.org/image/1491/news_release/2004-10
Credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)
Like many other so-called planetary nebulae, IC 4406 (also known as the Retina Nebula) exhibits a high degree of symmetry; the left and right halves are nearly mirror images of the other. If we could fly around IC 4406 in a starship, we would see that the gas and dust form a vast doughnut of material streaming outward from the dying star. From Earth, we are viewing the doughnut from the side. This side view allows us to see the intricate tendrils of dust that have been compared to the eye's retina. In other planetary nebulae, like the Ring Nebula (NGC 6720), we view the doughnut from the top.
The doughnut of material confines the intense radiation coming from the remnant of the dying star. Gas on the inside of the doughnut is ionized by light from the central star and glows. Light from oxygen atoms is rendered blue in this image; hydrogen is shown as green, and nitrogen as red. The range of color in the final image shows the differences in concentration of these three gases in the nebula.
Unseen in the Hubble image is a larger zone of neutral gas that is not emitting visible light, but which can be seen by radio telescopes.
One of the most interesting features of IC 4406 is the irregular lattice of dark lanes that criss-cross the center of the nebula. These lanes are about 160 astronomical units wide (1 astronomical unit is the distance between Earth and the Sun). They are located right at the boundary between the hot glowing gas that produces the visual light imaged here and the neutral gas seen with radio telescopes. We see the lanes in silhouette because they have a density of dust and gas that is a thousand times higher than the rest of the nebula. The dust lanes are like a rather open mesh veil that has been wrapped around the bright doughnut.
The fate of these dense knots of material is unknown. Will they survive the nebula's expansion and become dark denizens of the space between the stars or simply dissipate?
This image is a composite of data taken by Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 in June 2001 and January 2002. Filters used to create this color image show oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen gas glowing in this object.
For more information please visit: hubblesite.org/image/1209/news_release/2002-14
Credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowledgment: C.R. O'Dell (Vanderbilt University)
Resembling a rippling pool illuminated by underwater lights, the Egg Nebula offers astronomers a special look at the normally invisible dust shells swaddling an aging star. These dust layers, extending over one-tenth of a light-year from the star, have an onion-skin structure that forms concentric rings around the star. A thicker dust belt, running almost vertically through the image, blocks off light from the central star. Twin beams of light radiate from the hidden star and illuminate the pitch-black dust like a shining flashlight in a smoky room.
The artificial colors in this image are used to dissect how the light reflects off the smoke-sized dust particles and then heads toward Earth.
Dust in our atmosphere reflects sunlight such that only light waves vibrating in a certain orientation get reflected toward us. This is also true for reflections off water or roadways. Polarizing sunglasses take advantage of this effect to block out all reflections, except those that align to the polarizing filter material. It's a bit like sliding a sheet of paper under a door. The paper must be parallel to the floor to pass under the door.
Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys has polarizing filters that accept light that vibrates at select angles. In this composite image, the light from one of the polarizing filters has been colored red and only admits light from about one-third of the nebula. Another polarizing filter accepts light reflected from a different swath of the nebula. This light is colored blue. Light from the final third of the nebula is from a third polarizing filter and is colored green. Some of the inner regions of the nebula appear whitish because the dust is thicker and the light is scattered many times in random directions before reaching us. (Likewise, polarizing sunglasses are less effective if the sky is very dusty).
By studying polarized light from the Egg Nebula, scientists can tell a lot about the physical properties of the material responsible for the scattering, as well as the precise location of the central (hidden) star. The fine dust is largely carbon, manufactured by nuclear fusion in the heart of the star and then ejected into space as the star sheds material. Such dust grains are essential ingredients for building dusty disks around future generations of young stars, and possibly in the formation of planets around those stars.
The Egg Nebula is located 3,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. This image was taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys in September and October 2002.
For more information please visit: hubblesite.org/image/1305/news_release/2003-09
Credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowledgment: W. Sparks (STScI) and R. Sahai (JPL)
All images in this set are participating in the 2014 Hubble Madness Championship, at www.facebook.com/HubbleTelescope/app_432387213452269.