Tag: Images

Spiral Galaxy NGC 3147 from Hubble

The graceful, winding arms of the majestic spiral galaxy NGC 3147 appear like a grand spiral staircase sweeping through space in this Hubble Space Telescope image. They are actually long lanes of young blue stars, pinkish nebulas, and dust in silhouette. The beauty of the galaxy belies the fact that at its very center is a malnourished black hole surrounded by a thin, compact disk of stars, gas, and dust that have been caught up in a gravitational maelstrom. The black hole’s gravity is so intense that […]

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Orion Widefield

Cradled in cosmic dust and glowing hydrogen, stellar nurseries in Orion the Hunter lie at the edge of a giant molecular cloud some 1,500 light-years away. Spanning nearly 25 degrees, this breath-taking vista stretches across the well-known constellation from head to toe (left to right). The Great Orion Nebula, the closest large star forming region, is right of center. To its left are the Horsehead Nebula, M78, and Orion’s belt stars. Image: Annotated Image: Equipment: Acquisition: Processing:

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ARP 274 from Hubble

To celebrate my 18th birthday, I decided to process one of my favorite Hubble images! This was taken back in 2009 to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy by WFPC2. Given that it was taken by such a low-sensitivity sensor, this image actually had a whole lot of noise to deal with. I spent a while carefully removing hot pixels and cosmic rays to make the image look better. In case you’re wondering what exactly you’re looking at, here’s a little explanation about the galaxies: Arp 274 […]

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Dim spiral galaxy IC 5332 from HST and JWST

IC 5332, also known as PGC 71775 is an intermediate spiral galaxy about 30 million light-years away in the constellation Sculptor. IC 5332 is a delicate spiral galaxy that is unusually faint and beautifully symmetrical. As viewed from earth it is nearly face on. It has a very small central bulge and open spiral arms accounting for its classification (SABc). The galaxy lies in the direction of the celestial south pole. I wanted to highlight the JWST dust lanes more clearly, so I decided to stick to […]

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Hubble’s stunning 3-color mosaic of the Tarantula nebula

Below is a zoomable version of the tarantula nebula. You can also view this version here: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/230324. If you have a minute or ten, I really hope you spend some time just looking at the various little complications in this image – I assure you that it will be well worth your time! The full jpg version is available for free use on my flickr, which you can access by clicking the link below: If you would like to use a higher-quality version, feel free to email […]

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Hershel’s image of the upper orion molecular complex

Stunning new view from ESAs Herschel space observatory of the iconic Horsehead Nebula in the context of its surroundings. The image is a composite of the wavelengths of 70 microns (blue), 160 microns (green) and 250 microns (red), and covers 4.5×1.5 degrees. The image is oriented with northeast towards the left of the image and southwest towards the right. The Horsehead Nebula resides in the constellation Orion, about 1300 light-years away, and is part of the vast Orion Molecular Cloud complex. The Horsehead appears to rise above […]

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Interesting Astronomy news from the week of 8/7/2022

Read about the coolest discoveries, research updates, and images of this week’s astronomy: A new JWST brown dwarf, the first ever detection of gas in a planetary disk, and a new image of colliding galaxies from Gemni North Observatory

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The interacting triplet M81, M82, and NGC 3077- An ultra deep 219 hour collaboration detailing the nuanced interaction remnants and galactic cirrus.

This incredibly detailed image of the interacting triplet M81, M82, and NGC 3077 was created from more than 216 hours of exposure across three continents —  Europe, USA, and Oceania. We combined 4019 subframes and 12993 minutes of exposure to reveal faint details previously masked by lower amounts of data. The high exposure time also allowed us to sharpen fine features, giving the image more contrast and revealing more fine structures. On the top of the image lies NGC 3077, a small starburst dwarf galaxy with a […]

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Hypersonic superheated rainbow outflows from a dying star – NGC 6302 from Hubble

This image was featured as NASA’s astronomy picture of the day on 11/21/2022: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap221121.html The spectacular planetary nebula NGC 6302 lies roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. More popularly known as the Bug Nebula or the Butterfly Nebula, this celestial object looks like a delicate butterfly. But what resemble dainty wings are actually roiling regions 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 […]

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Outflows and shockwaves in the the crab nebula – Hubble’s view over the course of 1260 days!

Normally, space is portrayed as static. With objects thousands of light years across, and tens of thousands of parsecs away, what change could we possibly see from earth? Yet in this video of the crab nebula, we see a dynamic object expanding, rife with shockwaves and speeding outflows. Over the course of 1260 days (3.5 years), we can see the gas in the nebula expand at a blistering pace by about 163,296,000,000 kilometers, or about 0.017 light years. So what’s causing these outflows? At the center of […]

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