Okay So. Does Anybody Remember This Creepy Image? And Yes, It's Real, By The Way.

A stellar exodus was caught in action!  Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to watch the white dwarf exodus in the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae, a dense swarm of hundreds of thousands of stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Hubble took snapshots of fledgling white dwarf stars beginning their slow-paced, 40-million-year migration from the crowded center of an ancient star cluster to the less populated suburbs. By observing ultraviolet light, astronomers examined 3,000 white dwarfs, tracing two populations with diverse ages and orbits. One grouping was 6 million years old and had just begun their journey. Another was around 100 million years old and had already arrived at its new homestead far from the center, roughly 1.5 light-years, or nearly 9 trillion miles (14 trillion kilometers), away. The cluster resides 14,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Tucana. Credit: NASA, ESA, and H. Richer and J. Heyl (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada). ALT TEXT: Thousands of stars, seen as tiny dots, are shown on a black background. The stars vary in size and color, including orange, yellow, and white.

Happy Moon Landing Day 🌕🐇

Saturn, Cassini

The close-up of the Andromeda Galaxy from the Hubble Space Telescope shows how many stars there really are.

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Saturn has a mysterious hexagon at its north pole that has refused to give up its secrets, probably because neither Voyager 1 nor Cassini was able to plunge that deep and survive. Harvard scientists Rakesh Yadav and Jeremy Bloxham might have finally started to figure out what causes this peculiar feature. They believe that vortexes occur at the planet’s north pole because of atmospheric flows deep within the gas giant, and that these vortexes pinch an intense horizontal jet near the equator—which is what warps the storm into a hexagon. It still looks unnatural though.....!!!

Inneston, South Australia, Australia | blntpencil

NGC 1365, Heart of the Universe

Do you ever think about the infinite

2024 February 2

NGC 1893 and the Tadpoles of IC 410 Image Credit & Copyright: Sander de Jong

Explanation: This cosmic view shows off an otherwise faint emission nebula IC 410, captured under clear Netherlands skies with telescope and narrowband filters. Above and right of center you can spot two remarkable inhabitants of the interstellar pond of gas and dust, known as the tadpoles of IC 410. Partly obscured by foreground dust, the nebula itself surrounds NGC 1893, a young galactic cluster of stars. Formed in the interstellar cloud a mere 4 million years ago, the intensely hot, bright cluster stars energize the glowing gas. Globules composed of denser cooler gas and dust, the tadpoles are around 10 light-years long and are likely sites of ongoing star formation. Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation their heads are outlined by bright ridges of ionized gas while their tails trail away from the cluster’s central young stars. IC 410 and embedded NGC 1893 lie some 10,000 light-years away, toward the nebula-rich constellation Auriga.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240202.html

NASA's Juno spacecraft captured this look of high altitude haze forming above cyclones. At the time the image was taken, Juno was about 5,095 miles above Jupiter’s cloud tops 🛰