Astrophotography - Blog Posts
Picture of the Day!
The Pencil Nebula, 800 light-years away and nearly 5 light-years long, is a small part of the Vela supernova remnant. This supernova shock wave travels through space at over 500,000 kilometers per hour!
Image credit: Helge Buesing
Picture of the Day!
This image is composed of consecutive shots taken near Llers in Spain’s Girona province, showing Comet Pons-Brooks. After passing closest to the Sun, it is now fading as it moves into the southern skies toward the outer Solar System.
Image credit: Juan Carlos Casado
Video of the Day!
Hubble has discovered that Jupiter’s red spot - a storm larger than Earth - is wobbling!
Picture of the Day!
NGC 6188 Nebula is also known as the Firebird Nebula. It is an emission nebula located near the edge of a vast, dark molecular cloud in the southern constellation Ara, approximately 4,000 light-years from Earth.
Video of the Day!
NASA’s next mission to the Moon will carry LEXI (the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager), an instrument which will provide the first-ever global view of the magnetic field that shields Earth from solar radiation!
Picture of the Day!
Also referred to as Messier 31, the Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest major neighbor to the Milky Way. It is roughly twice the size of our galaxy and lies approximately 2.5 million light-years away.
Video of the Day!
An artist’s rendering shows us what happens when a star gets a little too close to a massive black hole!
Picture of the Day!
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured a stunning image of the iconic Pillars of Creation, a region where new stars are being born within thick clouds of gas and dust. The three-dimensional pillars resemble towering rock formations, yet they are much more porous. Composed of cool interstellar gas and dust, they sometimes appear semi-transparent in near-infrared light.
Astronomy Word of the Day
The Magellanic Clouds are two small, irregular dwarf galaxies outside of the Milky Way. These two galaxies are visible in the skies of the southern hemisphere, close to the South Celestial Pole, so they don't appear to set!
Image: https://aaa.org/.../01/southern-skies-the-magellanic-clouds/
Happy Halloween, everyone!
2024 October 27
LDN 43: The Cosmic Bat Nebula Credit & Copyright: Mark Hanson and Mike Selby; Text: Michelle Thaller (NASA’s GSFC)
Explanation: What is the most spook-tacular nebula in the galaxy? One contender is LDN 43, which bears an astonishing resemblance to a vast cosmic bat flying amongst the stars on a dark Halloween night. Located about 1400 light years away in the constellation Ophiuchus, this molecular cloud is dense enough to block light not only from background stars, but from wisps of gas lit up by the nearby reflection nebula LBN 7. Far from being a harbinger of death, this 12-light year-long filament of gas and dust is actually a stellar nursery. Glowing with eerie light, the bat is lit up from inside by dense gaseous knots that have just formed young stars.
∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap241027.html
Happy Monday!
Today's picture of the day was taken by Matthew Dominick from the ISS! The image shows a giant jet lightning, which is a new discovery (only 23 years!) and associated with thunderstorms. While regular lightning travels between the ground and the clouds, giant jet lightning bursts upwards.
Did you know that there are 5 known dwarf planets in our solar system? Everyone knows Pluto, but there is also Ceres, Haumea, Makemake and Eris.
Info from: https://www.iau.org/public/themes/pluto/#n6
Happy Wednesday! It's time for an astronomy word of the day!
Asterism - an asterism is any prominent star pattern that isn’t a whole constellation, such as the Northern Cross or the Big Dipper (pictured below)
Definition from: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-terms/ Image from: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/a-new-way-to-see-the-big-dipper/
Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA
Image taken by Alexandros Maragos
There was a supermoon yesterday (August 19th), which means that the moon appears larger and brighter than usual! Alexandros Maragos took this image as the blue supermoon was approaching its peak at the Temple of Poseidon in Greece. What an incredible image!
According to this article on NASA's website, Eta Carinae, a star in the Keyhole Nebula, went through an interesting outburst about 170 years ago, which made it one of the brightest stars in the southern sky. Check it out!
The Dolphin Head Nebula (Sh2-308, right) and Sh2-303 (left) // Jim Thommes
The Bearclaw Nebula, Sh2-200 // Dionysus
2024 January 9
Thor’s Helmet Image Credit & Copyright: Ritesh Biswas
Explanation: Thor not only has his own day (Thursday), but a helmet in the heavens. Popularly called Thor’s Helmet, NGC 2359 is a hat-shaped cosmic cloud with wing-like appendages. Heroically sized even for a Norse god, Thor’s Helmet is about 30 light-years across. In fact, the cosmic head-covering is more like an interstellar bubble, blown with a fast wind from the bright, massive star near the bubble’s center. Known as a Wolf-Rayet star, the central star is an extremely hot giant thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova stage of evolution. NGC 2359 is located about 15,000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Great Overdog. This remarkably sharp image is a mixed cocktail of data from narrowband filters, capturing not only natural looking stars but details of the nebula’s filamentary structures. The star in the center of Thor’s Helmet is expected to explode in a spectacular supernova sometime within the next few thousand years.
∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240109.html
2024 January 16
The Orion You Can Almost See Image Credit & Copyright: Michele Guzzini
Explanation: Do you recognize this constellation? Although it is one of the most recognizable star groupings on the sky, this is a more full Orion than you can see – an Orion only revealed with long exposure digital camera imaging and post- processing. Here the cool red giant Betelgeuse takes on a strong orange tint as the brightest star on the upper left. Orion’s hot blue stars are numerous, with supergiant Rigel balancing Betelgeuse on the lower right, and Bellatrix at the upper right. Lined up in Orion’s belt are three stars all about 1,500 light-years away, born from the constellation’s well-studied interstellar clouds. Just below Orion’s belt is a bright but fuzzy patch that might also look familiar – the stellar nursery known as Orion’s Nebula. Finally, just barely visible to the unaided eye but quite striking here is Barnard’s Loop – a huge gaseous emission nebula surrounding Orion’s Belt and Nebula discovered over 100 years ago by the pioneering Orion photographer E. E. Barnard.
∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240116.html
Mosaic of the Eagle Nebula, June 6, 2015. Image Credit: Adam Gustafson | Jamie Kern | BSU Observatory.
Imaged in luminance and photometric R, V and B filters. Approximately 2 hours total exposure time.
The Eagle nebula is a stellar nursery where new stars are born.
Uranus and some of its moons on October 20, 2023 // Louis Fico
I think the moons in this image could be Titania, Umbriel, Ariel, and Oberon, tho which points of light they are is hard to say
2023 October 10
Hidden Orion from Webb Image Credit & License: NASA, ESA, CSA, JWST; Processing: M. McCaughrean & S. Pearson
Explanation: The Great Nebula in Orion has hidden stars. To the unaided eye in visible light, it appears as a small fuzzy patch in the constellation of Orion. But this image was taken by the Webb Space Telescope in a representative-color composite of red and very near infrared light. It confirms with impressive detail that the Orion Nebula is a busy neighborhood of young stars, hot gas, and dark dust. The rollover image shows the same image in representative colors further into the near infrared. The power behind much of the Orion Nebula (M42) is the Trapezium - a cluster of bright stars near the nebula’s center. The diffuse and filamentary glow surrounding the bright stars is mostly heated interstellar dust. Detailed inspection of these images shows an unexpectedly large number of Jupiter-Mass Binary Objects (JuMBOs), pairs of Jupiter-mass objects which might give a clue to how stars are forming. The whole Orion Nebula cloud complex, which includes the Horsehead Nebula, will slowly disperse over the next few million years.
∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231010.html
Young Stars, Stellar Jets via NASA https://ift.tt/mUE9hQK
2023 October 18
Dust and the Western Veil Nebula Image Credit & Copyright: Jiang Wu
Explanation: It’s so big it is easy to miss. The entire Veil Nebula spans six times the diameter of the full moon, but is so dim you need binoculars to see it. The nebula was created about 15,000 years ago when a star in the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus) exploded. The spectacular explosion would have appeared brighter than even Venus for a week - but there is no known record of it. Pictured is the western edge of the still-expanding gas cloud. Notable gas filaments include the Witch’s Broom Nebula on the upper left near the bright foreground star 52 Cygni, and Fleming’s Triangular Wisp (formerly known as Pickering’s Triangle) running diagonally up the image middle. What is rarely imaged – but seen in the featured long exposure across many color bands – is the reflecting brown dust that runs vertically up the image left, dust likely created in the cool atmospheres of massive stars.
∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap231018.html
The 2023 Annular Eclipse as seen from Albuquerque, NM // Jordan Martin
The Hidden Galaxy, IC 342 // Ondřej Pešák
Comet Nishimura Credit: Peter Kennett
The Black Eye Galaxy. Image Credit: Shane Johnson | Jamie Kern | BSU Observatory.
Imaged in luminance and photometric R, V and B filters. Total exposure time ~25 minutes.
The Black Eye Galaxy (M64) is a relatively nearby spiral with an extraordinary amount of dark dust partially obscuring its nucleus. Red hues peeking out in these dust lanes are caused by reddening when the dust scatters the bluer light from stars embedded within it. The color difference between the center and spiral arms is due to an average age difference between the stars in these locations--blue stars have short lives, so as the star population ages the overall color appears more red.
Mosaic of the Eagle Nebula, June 6, 2015. Image Credit: Adam Gustafson | Jamie Kern | BSU Observatory.
Imaged in luminance and photometric R, V and B filters. Approximately 2 hours total exposure time.
The Eagle nebula is a stellar nursery where new stars are born.
The NGC 70 Group // Michael Legary