Solar Filaments A.k.a. Prominences – When Observed At The Solar Limb (above), Are Long Clouds Of

Comet Catalina Emerges : Comet Catalina is ready for its close-up. The giant snowball from the outer Solar System, known formally as C/2013 US10 tails, making it an impressive object for binoculars and long-exposure cameras. The featured image was taken last week from the Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa. Sky enthusiasts around the world will surely be tracking the comet over the next few months to see how it evolves. via NASA

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A HD Sweep Of Pluto!

Click on the image above to see a HD sweep of the surface of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft! This is a short post made to accompany my other Pluto post here!

Credits: NASA/New Horizons/Jhu

ESO 378-1

Do telescopes actually take colorful photographs or are the pretty colorful photographs of galaxies that we know colored afterwards? If a human was floating through space, would space look colorful to them?

So some pictures are taken in different wavelengths to see different characteristics. (infrared wavelengths to see through thick gas and dust, xray wavelengths to see highly energized regions)

But, in the visible wavelengths you are seeing the colors. They’re just enhanced brighter than they might be.

For example, I took this picture of “the California Nebula” using a camera (Canon 60Da) attached to a telescope. This shows one exposure, and the background is red due to effects of the camera (which you subtract):

You take multiple exposures, combine them, subtract the background effects & adjust the color a little and get this…

The giant star Zeta Ophiuchi

Wide-field view of the sky around the exotic binary star system AR Scorpii

This wide-field image from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 shows the rich starfields surrounding the exotic binary star system AR Scorpii.

Credit: Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin

I Zwicky 18 - One of the Strangest Known Irregular Galaxies

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NGC 2736: The Pencil Nebula

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Jupiter’s south pole, taken by Cassini