Outside our Bubble

Hubble, Bubble, Boil and Trouble!

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This is the Martian volcano Olympus Mons. It is the tallest volcano in our solar system.

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Full eclipse of the moon and sun

The Sun's corona radiates, 2009 total solar ecilpse over the Marshall Islands.

Credit: Vojtech Rusin

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NGC 2467 and Surroundings

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In this handout image released on April 30, 2013 by NASA, the spinning vortex of Saturn’s north polar storm is seen from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on November 27, 2012 in the Saturnian system of space. The false-color image of the storm resembles a red rose surrounded by green foliage which was made by using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light at a distance of approximately 261,000 miles from Saturn.

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Sunset on Mars

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In Space, J Dilla

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McCandless Orbits in Jetpack

On Feb. 12, 1984, astronaut Bruce McCandless, ventured further away from the confines and safety of his ship than any previous astronaut had ever been. This space first was made possible by a nitrogen jet propelled backpack, previously known at NASA as the Manned Manuevering Unit or MMU. After a series of test maneuvers inside and above Challenger's payload bay, McCandless went "free-flying" to a distance of 320 feet away from the Orbiter. This stunning orbital panorama view shows McCandless out there amongst the black and blue of Earth and space. Image Credit: NASA

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The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope offers this delightful view of the crowded stellar encampment called Messier 68, a spherical, star-filled region of space known as a globular cluster. Mutual gravitational attraction amongst a cluster’s hundreds of thousands or even millions of stars keeps stellar members in check, allowing globular clusters to hang together for many billions of years. Astronomers can measure the ages of globular clusters by looking at the light of their constituent stars. The chemical elements leave signatures in this light, and the starlight reveals that globular clusters' stars typically contain fewer heavy elements, such as carbon, oxygen and iron, than stars like the Sun. Since successive generations of stars gradually create these elements through nuclear fusion, stars having fewer of them are relics of earlier epochs in the Universe. Indeed, the stars in globular clusters rank among the oldest on record, dating back more than 10 billion years. More than 150 of these objects surround our Milky Way galaxy. On a galactic scale, globular clusters are indeed not all that big. In Messier 68's case, its constituent stars span a volume of space with a diameter of little more than a hundred light-years. The disc of the Milky Way, on the other hand, extends over some 100,000 light-years or more. Messier 68 is located about 33,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra (the female water snake). French astronomer Charles Messier notched the object as the sixty-eighth entry in his famous catalogue in 1780. Hubble added Messier 68 to its own impressive list of cosmic targets in this image using the Wide Field Camera of Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The image, which combines visible and infrared light, has a field of view of approximately 3.4 by 3.4 arcminutes.

Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

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Michael Collins is the only human, living or dead, not contained in the frame of this picture.

On July 21, 1969 Apollo 11 astronauts Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. lifted off the lunar surface in the ascent stage of their lunar module dubbed "The Eagle" -- after becoming the first to walk on the moon. Seen here the Eagle soars towards a rendezvous with the orbiting Command Module piloted by Michael Collins. The smooth, dark mare area on the surface below is Mare Smithii located just below the equator on the extreme eastern edge of the lunar nearside. The Earth is visible hanging above the moon's western horizon.

Image Credit: Apollo 11, NASA

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The Antennae (To me it looks like a heart)

Explanation: Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus, two large galaxies collided. But the stars in the two galaxies cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 don't collide in the course of the ponderous, billion year or so long event. Instead, their large clouds of molecular gas and dust do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic wreckage. Spanning about 500 thousand light-years, this stunning view also reveals new star clusters and matter flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational tidal forces. Of course, the visual appearance of the far-flung arcing structures gives the galaxy pair its popular name - The Antennae. 

Image Creditt: Acquisition and data reduction - Andrey Oreshko (Elena Remote Observatory),Processing - Dietmar Hager (stargazer-observatory) 

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Space Station Over the Ionian Sea 

The Space Shuttle Endeavour crew captured this shot of the International Space Station (ISS) against the backdrop of Planet Earth. Pictured during this inspection tour, the ISS is visible in front the Ionian Sea. The boot of Italy is visible on the left, while the western coastlines of Greece and Albania stretch across the top. The dorsal fin of the upside-down shuttle orbiter pokes into the very top of the image.

Image Credit: STS-118 Shuttle Crew, NASA

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Sunrise over Earth (render)

Image Credit: hazza42

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Annotated with objects

This enormous section of the Milky Way galaxy is a mosaic of images from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The constellations Cassiopeia and Cepheus are featured in this 1,000-square degree expanse. These constellations, named after an ancient Queen and King of Ethiopia in Greek mythology, are visible in the northern sky every night of the year as seen from most of the United States. 

To the unaided human eye, Cassiopeia is easily recognizable by the five bright stars that make up its "W" shape. However, WISE observed infrared light, where the sky takes on a very different appearance. The bright stars of the constellations fade into obscurity amongst the backdrop of millions of other stars revealed by WISE. Cool clouds of dust that fill the space between the stars in the Milky Way glow in infrared light and tell us more about the story of how stars are born, and how they die. 

Within this image are dozens of dense clouds, called nebulae. Many of the nebulae seen here are places where new stars are forming, creating bubble like structures that can be dozens to hundreds of light-years in size. The process of star formation within these giant clouds has been likened to fireworks, celebrating the birth of new generations of stars. But the death of stars is also seen in the remnants of a supernova explosion that was witnessed by the astronomer Tycho Brahe in 1572 AD. This remnant is located about one-fifth of the way from left of center, and about one-sixth of the way up from the middle of the image. 

The colors used in this image represent specific wavelengths of infrared light. Blue and cyan (blue-green) represent light emitted at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is predominantly from stars. Green and red represent light from 12 and 22 microns, respectively, which is mostly emitted by dust. This image is a mosaic of thousands of individual frames from WISE, combined first into 442 interlocking tiles before re-projecting and stitching them into the final picture. This was done for each of the four WISE wavelengths, totaling nearly 30 billion pixels in the interlocking tiles. 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

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The Great Nebula in Carina 

The most detailed image ever taken of the dark clouds of the Carina Nebula. 

What forms dark hiding in the mists of the Carina Nebula? 

These figures are threatening molecular cloud of molecular gas knots and dust so thick they have become opaque. 

In comparison, these clouds are much less dense than Earth's atmosphere. 

The Carina Nebula stretches over 300 light-years behind and 7 500 light-years away in the constellation Carina. NGC 3372 is known as the Great Carina Nebula. Eta Carinae, the most energetic star of the nebula, was one of the brightest stars in the sky during the 1830s, but faded radically.

Full resolution: here [29,566 × 14,321 pixels, 200.00MB]

Image credit: la NASA, ESA, N. Smith (U. California, Berkeley) et (STScI/AURA)

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M104 Hubble Remix - The Sombrero Galaxy

The striking spiral galaxy M104 is famous for its nearly edge-on profile featuring a broad ring of obscuring dust. Seen in silhouette against a bright bulge of stars, the swath of cosmic dust lanes lends a hat-like appearance to the galaxy in optical images suggesting the more popular moniker, The Sombrero Galaxy. Here, Hubble Space Telescope archival image data has been reprocessed to create this alternative look at the well-known galaxy. The newly developed processing improves the visibility of details otherwise lost in overwhelming glare, in this case allowing features of the galaxy's dust lanes to be followed well into the bright central region. About 50,000 light-years across and 28 million light-years away, M104 is one of the largest galaxies at the southern edge of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster.

Image Creditt: Vicent Peris (OAUV / PTeam), MAST, STScI, AURA, NASA

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The Known Universe

Takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan.

Data: Digital Universe, American Museum of Natural History

http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/universe/

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Extent of human radio broadcasts -

It's not the black square; it's the little blue dot at the center of that zoomed-in square.

Humans have been broadcasting radio waves into deep space for about a hundred years now, since the days of Marconi. That, of course, means there is an ever-expanding bubble announcing Humanity's presence to anyone listening in the Milky Way. This bubble is astronomically large (literally), and currently spans approximately 200 light years. But how big is this, really, compared to the size of the Galaxy in which we live (which is, itself, just one of countless billions of galaxies in the observable universe)? 

Image Credit: Adam Grossman / Nick Risinger