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mars is in dire need of some light pollution

#space #the slate

rosarabbit

Trying out ideas to make my first prints. I like drawing space too much and cats. So I put them together.

Lost in space.

check this out it’s a walking space cat

#gif #art #cats

newyork

Nichols Pond, Vermont | Photographer: Adam Woodworth

#space

adventures-of-thy-pagan-sou-blog

#space

astronauticalaspirations

Days of Messier: Spiral Galaxy M106

Pierre Méchain, as usual, discovered this galaxy in 1781, but was not added to the Messier Catalog until 1947. M106 is located 23.7 million light years away, spans 135,000 light years, and contains about 400 billion stars.

This intermediate spiral galaxy has a number of astronomically interesting features. In addition to several supernovae, it is considered a maser galaxy, a thick layer of dust focusing microwave radiation that passes through. The same process also gives the galaxy its purplish tinge. At the other end of the electromagnetic spectrum, M106 is a considerable x-ray source.

M106 may have a companion, the spiral NGC 4217, thought that is galaxy is believed to be much more distant.

Yesterday: M105, an elliptical galaxy Tomorrow: M107, a globular cluster

#space

cosmicvastness

Stardust in the Perseus Molecular Cloud

Clouds of stardust drift through this deep skyscape. The cosmic scene spans nearly 2 degrees across the Perseus molecular cloud some 850 light-years away. A triangle of dusty nebulae reflecting light from embedded stars is captured in the telescopic field of view. With a characteristic bluish color reflection nebula NGC 1333 is at left, vdB13 at bottom right, and rare yellowish reflection nebula vdB12 lies at the top. Stars are forming in the Perseus molecular cloud, though most are obscured at visible wavelengths by the pervasive dust. Still, hints of contrasting red emission from Herbig-Haro objects, the jets and shocked glowing gas emanating from recently formed stars, are evident in NGC 1333. At the estimated distance of the molecular cloud, legs of the triangle formed by the reflection nebulae would be about 20 light-years long.

Credit: Lorand Fenyes

cosmicvastness

A slice of Sagittarius

This stunning image, captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), shows part of the sky in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer). The region is rendered in exquisite detail — deep red and bright blue stars are scattered across the frame, set against a background of thousands of more distant stars and galaxies. Two features are particularly striking: the colours of the stars, and the dramatic crosses that burst from the centres of the brightest bodies.

While some of the colours in this frame have been enhanced and tweaked during the process of creating the image from the observational data, different stars do indeed glow in different colours. Stars differ in colour according to their surface temperature: very hot stars are blue or white, while cooler stars are redder. They may be cooler because they are smaller, or because they are very old and have entered the red giant phase, when an old star expands and cools dramatically as its core collapses.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

cosmicvastness

Starbirth with a chance of winds?

The lesser-known constellation of Canes Venatici (The Hunting Dogs), is home to a variety of deep-sky objects — including this beautiful galaxy, known as NGC 4861. Astronomers are still debating on how to classify it: While its physical properties — such as mass, size and rotational velocity — indicate it to be a spiral galaxy, its appearance looks more like a comet with its dense, luminous “head” and dimmer “tail” trailing behind. Features more fitting with a dwarf irregular galaxy. Although small and messy, galaxies like NGC 4861 provide astronomers with interesting opportunities for study. Small galaxies have lower gravitational potentials, which simply means that it takes less energy to move stuff about inside them than it does in other galaxies. As a result, moving in, around, and through such a tiny galaxy is quite easy to do, making them far more likely to be suffused with streams and outflows of speedy charged particles known as galactic winds, which can flood such galaxies with little effort. These galactic winds can be powered by the ongoing process of star formation, which involves huge amounts of energy. New stars are springing into life within the bright, colourful ‘head’ of NGC 4861 and ejecting streams of high-speed particles as they do so, which flood outwards to join the wider galactic wind. While NGC 4861 would be a perfect candidate to study such winds, recent studies did not find any galactic winds in it.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

cosmicvastness

La Silla airglow

While the brilliantly clear skies that can be found high up in Chile provide telescopes with fantastic views on the Universe, they also allow us to see effects that are closer to home. The night sky here above ESO’s La Silla Observatory is lit up with a natural effect known as airglow, a result of chemical reactions high up in the atmosphere. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are also visible as white splodges in the green glow.

Credit: P. Horálek/ESO

cosmicvastness

Crescent Enceladus

Peering from the shadows, the Saturn-facing hemisphere of tantalizing inner moon Enceladus poses in this Cassini spacecraft image. North is up in the dramatic scene captured last November as Cassini’s camera was pointed in a nearly sunward direction about 130,000 kilometers from the moon’s bright crescent. In fact, the distant world reflects over 90 percent of the sunlight it receives, giving its surface about the same reflectivity as fresh snow. A mere 500 kilometers in diameter, Enceladus is a surprisingly active moon. Data collected during Cassini’s flybys and years of images have revealed the presence of remarkable south polar geysers and a possible global ocean of liquid water beneath an icy crust.

Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA

cosmicvastness

A spiral in Andromeda

Not to be confused with our neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy, the Andromeda constellation is one of the 88 modern constellations. More importantly for this image, it is home to the pictured NGC 7640.

Many different classifications are used to identify galaxies by shape and structure — NGC 7640 is a barred spiral type. These are recognisable by their spiral arms, which fan out not from a circular core, but from an elongated bar cutting through the galaxy’s centre. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is also a barred spiral galaxy. NGC 7640 might not look much like a spiral in this image, but this is due to the orientation of the galaxy with respect to Earth — or to Hubble, which acted as photographer in this case! We often do not see galaxies face on, which can make features such as spiral arms less obvious.

There is evidence that NGC 7640 has experienced some kind of interaction in its past. Galaxies contain vast amounts of mass, and therefore affect one another via gravity. Sometimes these interactions can be mild, and sometimes hugely dramatic, with two or more colliding and merging into a new, bigger galaxy. Understanding the history of a galaxy, and what interactions it has experienced, helps astronomers to improve their understanding of how galaxies — and the stars within them — form.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA