space pictures....Or how to change your view of things

[Neil D]

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Wanna guess where this is at? Don't know? well concider checking here!

[Neil D]

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Two spots of snow cover the peaks of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea on the main island of Hawaii in this true-color image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua spacecraft.

This island is formed from three of the most active volcanoes in the world, the third being Mount Kilauea, which is on the southeastern shore and is outlined in red. Of the three, Mt. Kilauea is the most active, having started its most recent erupting in 1983, and not stopping since.

[Neil D]

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This is the sharpest image of Saturn's temperature emissions taken from the ground; it is a mosaic of 35 individual exposures made at the W.M. Keck I Observatory, Mauna Kea, Hawaii on Feb. 4, 2004.

The images to create this mosaic were taken with infrared radiation. The mosaic was taken at a wavelength near 17.65 microns and is sensitive to temperatures in Saturn's upper troposphere. The prominent hot spot at the bottom of the image is right at Saturn's south pole. The warming of the southern hemisphere was expected, as Saturn was just past southern summer solstice, but the abrupt changes in temperature with latitude were not expected. The tropospheric temperature increases toward the pole abruptly near 70 degrees latitude from 88 to 89 Kelvin (-301 to -299 degrees Fahrenheit) and then to 91 Kelvin (-296 degrees Fahrenheit) right at the pole.

Ring particles are not at a uniform temperature everywhere in their orbit around Saturn. The ring particles are orbiting clockwise in this image. Particles are coldest just after having cooled down in Saturn's shadow (lower left). As they orbit Saturn, the particles increase in temperature up to a maximum (lower right) just before passing behind Saturn again in shadow.

A small section of the ring image is missing because of incomplete mosaic coverage during the observing sequence.

[Neil D]

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A satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is a wonder of the southern sky, a mere 210,000 light-years distant in the constellation Tucana.

Found among the SMC's clusters and nebulae NGC 346 is a star forming region about 200 light-years across, pictured above by the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers have identified a population of embryonic stars strung along the dark, intersecting dust lanes visible here on the right. Still collapsing within their clouds, the stellar infants' light is reddened by the intervening dust.

Small galaxies like the SMC -- and the stellar nurseries within them -- are thought to be building blocks for the larger galaxies present today.

[Neil D]

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- A Hubble Space Telescope image of a portion of the Hubble Deep Field North as originally photographed in 1995 with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.

- A composite image of the same field as imaged by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), combined with the original WFPC2 image. The ACS observations were made in May and June 2002. The red spot is the glow of a very distant supernova captured exploding in the field. The supernova is estimated to be 8 billion light-years away. The supernova appears deep red in this composite image because it was photographed by the ACS at far-red wavelengths. Distant supernovae are used by astronomers to fill in the blank region where the universe's rate of expansion switched from deceleration due to gravity to acceleration due to the repulsive force of "dark energy."

[Neil D]

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Looks can be deceiving, especially when it comes to celestial objects like galaxies and nebulas. These objects are so far away that astronomers cannot see their three-dimensional structure. The Helix Nebula, for example, resembles a doughnut in colorful images. Earlier images of this complex object -- the gaseous envelope ejected by a dying, sun-like star -- did not allow astronomers to precisely interpret its structure. One possible interpretation was that the Helix's form resembled a snake-like coil. Now, a team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has established that the Helix's structure is even more perplexing. Their evidence suggests that the Helix consists of two disks nearly perpendicular to each other.

[Neil D]

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The Bug Nebula, NGC 6302, is one of the brightest and most extreme planetary nebulae known. The fiery, dying star at its center is shrouded by a blanket of icy hailstones. This NASA Hubble Wide Field Plantery Camera 2 image shows impressive walls of compressed gas, laced with trailing strands and bubbling outflows.

[Neil D]

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The Hubble telescope has spied a giant celestial "eye," known as planetary nebula NGC 6751. The Hubble Heritage Project is releasing this picture to commemorate the Hubble telescope's tenth anniversary. Glowing in the constellation Aquila, the nebula is a cloud of gas ejected several thousand years ago from the hot star visible in its center. Planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets. They are shells of gas thrown off by Sun-like stars nearing the ends of their lives. The star's loss of its outer, gaseous layers exposes the hot stellar core, whose strong ultraviolet radiation then causes the ejected gas to fluoresce as the planetary nebula.

[Amelia]

Sights like these will be lost to us when the Hubble finally dies its last death. Well....that is until Jesus comes again. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbsup.gif" alt="" />

[Neil D]

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A tempestuous relationship between an unlikely pair of stars may have created an oddly shaped, gaseous nebula that resembles an hourglass nestled within an hourglass.

Images taken with Earth-based telescopes have shown the larger, hourglass-shaped nebula. But this picture, taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, reveals a small, bright nebula embedded in the center of the larger one (close-up of nebula in inset). Astronomers have dubbed the entire nebula the "Southern Crab Nebula" (He2-104), because, from ground-based telescopes, it looks like the body and legs of a crab. The nebula is several light-years long.

The possible creators of these shapes cannot be seen at all in this Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 image. It's a pair of aging stars buried in the glow of the tiny, central nebula. One of them is a red giant, a bloated star that is exhausting its nuclear fuel and is shedding its outer layers in a powerful stellar wind. Its companion is a hot, white dwarf, a stellar zombie of a burned-out star. This odd duo of a red giant and a white dwarf is called a symbiotic system. The red giant is also a Mira Variable, a pulsating red giant, that is far away from its partner. It could take as much as 100 years for the two to orbit around each other.

Astronomers speculate that the interaction between these two stars may have sparked episodic outbursts of material, creating the gaseous bubbles that form the nebula. They interact by playing a celestial game of "catch": as the red giant throws off its bulk in a powerful stellar wind, the white dwarf catches some of it. As a result, an accretion disk of material forms around the white dwarf and spirals onto its hot surface. Gas continues to build up on the surface until it sparks an eruption, blowing material into space.

This explosive event may have happened twice in the "Southern Crab." Astronomers speculate that the hourglass-shaped nebulae represent two separate outbursts that occurred several thousand years apart. The jets of material in the lower left and upper right corners may have been accelerated by the white dwarf's accretion disk and probably are part of the older eruption.

The nebula, located in the Southern Hemisphere constellation of Centaurus, is a few thousand light-years from Earth.

This image, taken in May 1999, captures the glow of nitrogen gas energized by the white dwarf's intense radiation.

These results were presented at the "Asymmetrical Planetary Nebulae II: From Origins to Microstructures" conference, which took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, August 3-6, 1999

[Neil D]

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A Puzzle of Galactic Evolution is Solved — Massive Gas Clouds Seed the Galaxy with the Stuff of Stars

Massive clouds of gas, discovered long ago but only recently identified as being within the margins of the Milky Way, play a key role in the galaxy's ability to churn out new stars by raining gas onto the plane of the galaxy. Researchers have chipped away at a three-decade-old mystery about the nature and role of those massive gas clouds, called high-velocity clouds. In the process, they've discovered a mechanism by which the galaxy is seeded with the stuff of stars and solved a long-standing question of galactic evolution.

[Neil D]

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Hubble Watches Light from Mysterious Erupting Star Reverberate Through Space

In January 2002, a dull star in an obscure constellation suddenly became 600,000 times more luminous than our Sun, temporarily making it the brightest star in our Milky Way galaxy. The mysterious star, called V838 Monocerotis, has long since faded back to obscurity. But observations by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope of a phenomenon called a "light echo" around the star have uncovered remarkable new features. These details promise to provide astronomers with a CAT-scan-like probe of the three-dimensional structure of shells of dust surrounding an aging star.

[Neil D]

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By Popular Demand: Hubble Observes the Horsehead Nebula

Rising from a sea of dust and gas like a giant seahorse, the Horsehead nebula is one of the most photographed objects in the sky. The Hubble telescope took a close-up look at this heavenly icon, revealing the cloud's intricate structure. This detailed view of the horse's head is being released to celebrate the orbiting observatory's eleventh anniversary. Hubble was launched by the Space Shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990 and deployed into a 360-mile-high Earth orbit on April 25. Produced by the Hubble Heritage Project, this picture is a testament to the Horsehead's popularity. Internet voters selected this object for the orbiting telescope to view.

[Neil D]

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In this stunning picture of the giant galactic nebula NGC 3603, the Hubble telescope's crisp resolution captures various stages of the life cycle of stars in one single view.

This picture nicely illustrates the entire stellar life cycle of stars, starting with the Bok globules and giant gaseous pillars (evidence of embryonic stars), followed by circumstellar disks around young stars, and progressing to aging, massive stars in a young starburst cluster. The blue super-giant with its ring and bipolar outflow [upper left of center] marks the end of the life cycle.

[Pockey]

Whoa...those are really amazing. I need to seriously get out more.

[Rosie]

Awesome Neil,

These pics are a real treat.