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Picture of the Day - February 2, 2019 - (Very Late Post)

The core of a galaxy.

In honor of NASA’s successful landing of the InSight Lander, here are a couple of Space Engine pictures of Mars centered on the Elysium Planitia.

Had to take a second closer picture since Phobos got in the way of the first picture.

High Resolution Pictures

Picture 1

Picture 2

Pictures of the day - December 16, 2018

Insight A System - 3rd Planet (Insight A-III)

Insight A-III is the third planet orbiting Insight A. It is a hot Ice-giant orbiting it’s sun at an average distance of 0.12 AU. The planet’s atmosphere has a temperature of 960 F and it’s atmosphere lacks any type of define cloud decks. This is a helium ice giant, meaning that it has lost all of it’s hydrogen and the atmosphere is dominated by helium instead. As a result, the planet has a monochromatic color.

Insight A-III has a mass of 13.22 Earths, and a diameter of 4.03 times that of Earth. The planet is tidally locked to it’s sun and orbits the sun once every 14.76 Earth days.

High Resolution Pictures

Insight A-III

Lunar View

Asteroid Moon

Blinding Sun and Inner Planets

What’s the biggest misconception people have about space or astronomy in general?

I’m not sure which is the biggest mistake, but I believe that one of them is the colors that are imposed on the images of planets, nebulae and other bodies of space. Many images are not real colors, many of them are fake colors. False colors are used to differentiate, some particular type of material, temperature, wavelength, chemical or mineral variations, and other factors.

Mercury with colors in visible light

Color-enhanced, this image represents chemical and mineral variations across the planet: tan areas are lava-formed plains, and blue regions show material that reflects little light.

This image shows two different views of the Horsehead Nebula. On the right is a view of the nebula in visible light, taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile . The new image on the left shows the nebula in the infrared, using observations from Hubble’s high-resolution Wide Field Camera 3.

Some illustrations of space can also deceive or confuse, like images of exoplanets, where in fact we do not know for sure what it would be, since we can not have such clear images to the point where we can see them closely, and other things like representation of the curvature of space time, which shows a curvature in 2D, would actually be in 3D, but this is a little harder to visualize.

Curvature of the space-time fabric in 2D

Curvature of the space-time fabric in 3D

An annotated view of the Beta Pictoris system.

Artist’s impression of Beta Pictoris b. The debris disk around the parent star can be seen.

You can learn more about it by clicking here!

Pictures of the Day December 1, 2018

Insight System - Insight B-II

The second planet orbiting Insight B. This world is a more extreme version of Venus that is choked in a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere 427 times thicker than Earths. Unlike Venus, the atmosphere is humid, water vapor comprises 6.45% of the planet’s atmosphere, further amplifying the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere.

Insight B-II is a super earth with approximately 5.28 Earth’s masses, and a radius of 1.39 Earth Radii. The planet is quite dense and has a surface gravity of 2.7 g. Such a high surface gravity flattens the ground and results in only small elevation changes across the entire surface of the planet. The planet is tidally locked to the sun and orbiting at a distance of 0.09 AU. Surface temperatures average 1,182 F. Most of the surface consists of broad plains covered in shallow sand dunes.

High Resolution Pictures

Insight B-II

Approaching the atmosphere

Storms

Daytime sky

Twilight sky

Picture of the day - November 21, 2018

Small asteroid moon orbiting a gas giant.

Moon Halo

Credit: Mikhail Reva

IC 5070, Pelican in the Swan

My first posts will be from systems located within the Triangulum Galaxy. The above 3 images were taken from Space Engine of the galaxy. The background galaxy in the images is Andromeda.

For those of you that are not familiar with the Triangulum Galaxy, it is the third largest member of the local group, sometimes considered a satellite galaxy of Andromeda. The galaxy is also known as M33, NGC 598 or the Pinwheel Galaxy. Approximately 40 billion stars reside within this spiral galaxy. It is believed that the galaxy lacks a central supermassive black hole and central halo.

Wikipedia link below.

Triangulum Galaxy

Orange Gem

Picture of the Day - October 28, 2018

Here we have another Titan-Like world with rings. Seas of liquid methane cover the surface, and a thick hazy nitrogen-methane atmosphere obscures most of the surface.