Tag: nebulae

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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Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1300 from Hubble

The Hubble telescope captured a display of starlight, glowing gas, and silhouetted dark clouds of interstellar dust in this 4-foot-by-8-foot image of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1300. NGC 1300 is considered to be prototypical of barred spiral galaxies. Barred spirals differ from normal spiral galaxies in that the arms of the galaxy do not spiral all the way into the center, but are connected to the two ends of a straight bar of stars containing the nucleus at its center. At Hubble’s resolution, a myriad of […]

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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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The boomerang nebula from Hubble

The Hubble Space Telescope has “caught” the Boomerang Nebula in these new images taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys. This reflecting cloud of dust and gas has two nearly symmetric lobes (or cones) of matter that are being ejected from a central star. Over the last 1,500 years, nearly one and a half times the mass of our Sun has been lost by the central star of the Boomerang Nebula in an ejection process known as a bipolar outflow. The nebula’s name is derived from its […]

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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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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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