A luminous M101 with outer spiral arms

Big, beautiful spiral galaxy M101 is one of the last entries in Charles Messier’s famous catalog, but definitely not one of the least. About 170,000 light-years across, this galaxy is enormous, almost twice the size of our own Milky Way galaxy. M101 was also one of the original spiral nebulae observed by Lord Rosse’s large 19th century telescope, the Leviathan of Parsontown. M101 shares this modern telescopic field of view with more distant background galaxies, foreground stars within the Milky Way, and a companion dwarf galaxy NGC […]

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The Christmas Tree Nebula

Interstellar clouds of hydrogen gas and dust abound in this gorgeous skyscape. The 3 degree wide field of view stretches through the faint but fanciful constellation Monoceros, the Unicorn. A star forming region cataloged as NGC 2264 is centered, a complex jumble of cosmic gas, dust and stars about 2,700 light-years distant. It mixes reddish emission nebulae excited by energetic light from newborn stars with dark dust clouds. Where the otherwise obscuring dust clouds lie close to hot, young stars they also reflect starlight, forming blue reflection […]

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The dim and detailed jellyfish: A 112-hour collaboration from three continents!

The jellyfish nebula is a notoriously dim object in the night sky. As a result, most images of this nebula are highly denoised, leading to a loss of detail. But by combining nearly 1000 exposures and 6740 minutes of exposure from collaborators across three continents for a total integration time of 112.4 hours, we were able to reveal structures and detail previously not displayed by previous images.  In this image, channels are mapped in the classic Hubble palette, where ionized sulfur is represented by red, ionized hydrogen […]

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Stellar Fireworks in NGC 4449

NGC 4449 has been forming stars for several billion years, but currently it is experiencing a star formation event at a much higher rate than in the past. At the current rate, the gas supply that feeds the stellar production would only last for another billion years or so. The hot, new young stars are illuminating the surrounding gas in a beautiful display. Pink regions represent ionized hydrogen gas, and blue regions represent ionized oxygen gas. Image: Details: Data was taken from the following proposals: https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=10585, https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=10522 […]

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Hubble’s stunning 325 megapixel mosaic of the Tarantula Nebula

I don’t really think that words can effectively describe this image. There’s so much going on here that it almost seems wrong to try to simplify what’s happening, but here goes: At the top center lies a massive star cluster that’s putting out enormous amounts of energy. All the hydrogen gas around that star cluster is being ionized, much like a neon sign. The ionization and energy outflows create the beautiful knots and filaments that you can see. By looking at this region through a filter that […]

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A luminous M42

The first image from my new mount! The GEM28 has turned out to be an incredibly accurate mount, giving me sharp stars at 600mm with 4 minute exposures! The Great Orion Nebula, an immense, nearby starbirth region, is probably the most famous of all astronomical nebulas. Here, glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1500 light-years away. The bright core illuminates the surrounding the star cluster, highlighting the streams of dark dust on top. Image: Equipment: Nikon D800 […]

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NGC 105 from Hubble

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope displays spiral galaxy NGC 105, which lies 215 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces. NGC 105 appears to be plunging edge-on into a collision with a neighbouring galaxy, but this is just the result of the chance alignment of the two objects in the night sky. NGC 105’s elongated neighbor is actually far more distant and remains relatively unknown to astronomers. These misleading conjunctions occur frequently in astronomy, a great example being NGC 3314: https://theastroenthusiast.com/ngc-3314-from-hubble/ Image: Details: All data was […]

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NGC 1385 from Hubble

NGC 1385 is a strange spiral galaxy in the constellation Fornax. Originally a normal spiral, interaction with other galaxies nearby distorted its shape. The center of the galaxy was pulled and rotated 90 degrees to the shape it appears in now. Image: Details: All data was taken from the PHANGS-HST observation program. https://phangs.stsci.edu/ Processing: Crop stacking artifacts TGV+MMT denoise each channel Channel combine ArcinH stretch HDR multiscale transform MMT+Curves transformation Dark structure enhance LHE Curves trasnformation

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A colorful cosmic rose: A collaboration of 110+ hours of data from three continents

I highly recommend opening the full version to take a closer look at some of the finer details revealed by the large integration time. A starless copy is also provided to show off fainter detail. This incredibly detailed image of the Rosette nebula was created from more than 110 hours of exposure across three continents —  Europe, USA, and Oceania. We combined 1064 subframes and 6791 minutes of exposure to reveal faint details previously masked by lower amounts of data. The high exposure time also allowed us […]

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NGC 5189 from Hubble

Why is this beautiful nebula so complicated ? When a star is dying, it blast away its outer layers, usually into a simple overall shape. Sometimes this shape is a sphere, sometimes a double lobe, and sometimes a ring or a helix. In this image, however, no such simple structure has emerged. To help find out why, Hubble Space Telescope recently observed NGC 5189 in Hydrogen, Oxygen and Sulfur emission lines. Previous findings indicated the existence of multiple periods of material outflow, including a recent one that […]

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