Tag: hubble

Messier 51 from Hubble

The graceful, winding arms of the majestic whirlpool galaxy appear like a grand spiral staircase sweeping through space. They are actually long lanes of stars and gas laced with dust. This sharpest-ever image of the Whirlpool Galaxy illustrates a spiral galaxy’s grand design, from its curving spiral arms, where young stars reside, to its yellowish central core, a home of older stars. The bright pink regions display large bursts of H-alpha, where new stars are formed. I would highly recommend viewing this image on gigapan, where you […]

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NGC 3314 from Hubble

Update 11/17/2021: This image was featured by NASA’s APOD! You can check out their version here: https://theastroenthusiast.com/ngc-3314-from-hubble/ This object is not one but two – two galaxies seeming to overlap by mere chance. The spiral galaxy in front is viewed nearly face-on, its pinwheel shape defined by young, blue, bright star clusters. Against the glow of the background galaxy, dark swirling lanes of interstellar dust appear to dominate the face-on spiral structure. The dust lanes are surprisingly pervasive, and this remarkable pair of overlapping galaxies is one […]

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NGC 6814 from Hubble

Together with irregular galaxies, spiral galaxies make up approximately 60 percent of the galaxies in the local universe. However, despite their prevalence, each spiral galaxy is unique — like snowflakes, no two are alike. This is demonstrated by the striking face-on spiral galaxy NGC 6814, whose luminous nucleus and spectacular sweeping arms, rippled with an intricate pattern of dark dust, are captured in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. NGC 6814 has an extremely bright nucleus, a telltale sign that the galaxy is a Seyfert galaxy. These […]

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NGC 4651 from Hubble

This remarkable spiral galaxy, known as NGC 4651, may look serene and peaceful as it swirls in the vast, silent emptiness of space, but don’t be fooled — it keeps a violent secret. It is believed that this galaxy consumed another smaller galaxy to become the large and beautiful spiral that we observe today. Image: Details: All data was taken from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys from the following proposal: https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=12282 Processing: Create Superlum by averaging both channels Deconvolute lum Denoise lum RGB combine Color calibration ArcsinH […]

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NGC 4676 from Hubble

Update 10/4/2021: This image has been chosen as an APOD by NASA! You can view their write-up here: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap211004.html. These two mighty galaxies are pulling each other apart. Known as “The Mice” because they have such long tails, each spiral galaxy has likely already passed through the other. They will probably collide again and again until they coalesce. The long tails are created by the relative difference between gravitational pulls on the near and far parts of each galaxy. Because the distances are so large, the cosmic […]

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The Antennae Galaxies from Hubble

The galaxies in this image — also known as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 — are locked in a deadly embrace. Once normal, sedate spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, the pair have spent the past few hundred million years sparring with one another. This clash is so violent that stars have been ripped from their host galaxies to form a streaming arc between the two. In wide-field images of the pair the reason for their name becomes clear — far-flung stars and streamers of gas stretch out into […]

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NGC 3603 from Hubble

Like a 4th of July fireworks display, a young, glittering collection of stars looks like an aerial burst. The cluster is surrounded by clouds of interstellar gas and dust—the raw material for new star formation. The nebula, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina, contains a central cluster of huge, hot stars, called NGC 3603. This environment is not as peaceful as it looks. Ultraviolet radiation and violent stellar winds have blown out an enormous cavity in the gas and dust enveloping the cluster, providing an […]

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The dumbbell nebula from Hubble

When Hubble processes images, they usually crop to the most interesting part. This image, however, shows the entire area captured by the sensor! The pure black areas in this image are parts where there is no sensor. This image looks to me more like a painting than a photo. Tho colors, the bulbos shapes, the small details all look like oil on canvas. Image: Details: All data was taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) from the following proposal: https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=8726 Processing Stretch each channel combine colors […]

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NGC 7049 from Hubble

The NASA/ESA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured this image of NGC 7049, a mysterious looking galaxy on the border between spiral and elliptical galaxies. NGC 7049 is found in the constellation of Indus, and is the brightest of a cluster of galaxies, a so-called Brightest Cluster Galaxy (BCG). Typical BCGs are some of the oldest and most massive galaxies. They provide excellent opportunities for astronomers to study the elusive globular clusters lurking within. The globular clusters in NGC 7049 are seen as the sprinkling of small faint […]

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Hubble’s Pillars of creation – M16

This was a tough image to process – there were a bunch of tiny dark gaps and hot pixels scattered throughout the image. The image file sizes were also quite big, so processing took a long time. Nevertheless, I got a result that I am proud of! The data is just too good to process badly. I have to give so much credit to the HLSP team – they really did a phenomenal job creating this mosaic. These towering tendrils of cosmic dust and gas sit at […]

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