M8 - Lagoon Nebula Up Close

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Milky Way over Shelbyville, Indiana

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Night Sky Over Mt. Fuji - Jan. 2016

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Southern NGC7000

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Infrared Saturn Clouds via NASA http://ift.tt/2b5OdPE

Hubble Peers into the Storm

NASA - Hubble Space Telescope patch. Sept. 9, 2016

This shot from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a maelstrom of glowing gas and dark dust within one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). This stormy scene shows a stellar nursery known as N159, an HII region over 150 light-years across. N159 contains many hot young stars. These stars are emitting intense ultraviolet light, which causes nearby hydrogen gas to glow, and torrential stellar winds, which are carving out ridges, arcs, and filaments from the surrounding material. At the heart of this cosmic cloud lies the Papillon Nebula, a butterfly-shaped region of nebulosity. This small, dense object is classified as a High-Excitation Blob, and is thought to be tightly linked to the early stages of massive star formation.

Hubble orbiting Earth

N159 is located over 160,000 light-years away. It resides just south of the Tarantula Nebula (heic1402), another massive star-forming complex within the LMC.  This image comes from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys.  The region was previously imaged by Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, which also resolved the Papillon Nebula for the first time. Related links: heic1402: https://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1402/ Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2: https://www.spacetelescope.org/about/general/instruments/wfpc2/ For more information about the Hubble Space Telescope, visit: http://hubblesite.org/ http://www.nasa.gov/hubble https://www.spacetelescope.org/ Image, Video, Text, Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA/Text credit: European Space Agency/NASA/Karl Hille. Greetings, Orbiter.ch Full article

NGC 1275 Multi-Wavelength

Saturns north pole hexagon.

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A storm on Saturn so gigantic it’s “eating” it’s own tail.

Jupiter’s North Pole Unlike Anything Encountered in Solar System

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has sent back the first-ever images of Jupiter’s north pole, taken during the spacecraft’s first flyby of the planet with its instruments switched on. The images show storm systems and weather activity unlike anything previously seen on any of our solar system’s gas-giant planets.  “First glimpse of Jupiter’s north pole, and it looks like nothing we have seen or imagined before,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “It’s bluer in color up there than other parts of the planet, and there are a lot of storms. There is no sign of the latitudinal bands or zone and belts that we are used to – this image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter. We’re seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features.”

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS