Sunday, November 1, 2015

M27: Not a Comet

M27: Not a Comet: APOD: 2015 August 20 - M27: Not a Comet



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2015 August 20
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M27: Not a Comet
Image Credit & Copyright: Francesco di Biase
Explanation: While hunting for comets in the skies above 18th century France, astronomer Charles Messier diligently kept a list of the things he encountered that were definitely not comets. This is number 27 on his now famous not-a-comet list. In fact, 21st century astronomers would identify it as a planetary nebula, but it's not a planet either, even though it may appear round and planet-like in a small telescope. Messier 27 (M27) is an excellent example of a gaseous emission nebula created as a sun-like star runs out of nuclear fuel in its core. The nebula forms as the star's outer layers are expelled into space, with a visible glow generated by atoms excited by the dying star's intense but invisible ultraviolet light. Known by the popular name of the Dumbbell Nebula, the beautifully symmetric interstellar gas cloud is over 2.5 light-years across and about 1,200 light-years away in the constellation Vulpecula. This impressive color composite highlights details within the well-studied central region and fainter, seldom imaged features in the nebula's outer halo. It incorporates broad and narrowband images recorded using filters sensitive to emission from sulfur, hydrogen and oxygen atoms.

Tomorrow's picture: pixels in space
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Posted by Nelio Inacio at 4:57 PM 0 comments

Sprites from Space

Sprites from Space:

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2015 August 21


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Explanation: An old Moon and the stars of Orion rose above the eastern horizon on August 10. The Moon's waning crescent was still bright enough to be overexposed in this snapshot taken from another large satellite of planet Earth, the International Space Station. A greenish airglow traces the atmosphere above the limb of the planet's night. Below, city lights and lightning flashes from thunderstorms appear over southern Mexico. The snapshot also captures the startling apparition of a rare form of upper atmospheric lightning, a large red sprite caught above a lightning flash at the far right. While the space station's orbital motion causes the city lights to blur and trail during the exposure, the extremely brief flash of the red sprite is sharp. Now known to be associated with thunderstorms, much remains a mystery about sprites including how they occur, their effect on the atmospheric global electric circuit, and if they are somehow related to other upper atmospheric lightning phenomena such as blue jets or terrestrial gamma flashes.

Posted by Nelio Inacio at 4:56 PM 0 comments

Giant Cluster Bends Breaks Images

Giant Cluster Bends Breaks Images: APOD: 2015 August 23 - Giant Cluster Bends Breaks Images



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2015 August 23


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Giant Cluster Bends, Breaks Images
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Lee & H. Ford (Johns Hopkins U.)
Explanation: What are those strange blue objects? Many of the brightest blue images are of a single, unusual, beaded, blue, ring-like galaxy which just happens to line-up behind a giant cluster of galaxies. Cluster galaxies here typically appear yellow and -- together with the cluster's dark matter -- act as a gravitational lens. A gravitational lens can create several images of background galaxies, analogous to the many points of light one would see while looking through a wine glass at a distant street light. The distinctive shape of this background galaxy -- which is probably just forming -- has allowed astronomers to deduce that it has separate images at 4, 10, 11, and 12 o'clock, from the center of the cluster. A blue smudge near the cluster center is likely another image of the same background galaxy. In all, a recent analysis postulated that at least 33 images of 11 separate background galaxies are discernable. This spectacular photo of galaxy cluster CL0024+1654 from the Hubble Space Telescope was taken in November 2004.

Tomorrow's picture: triple gray
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Dione, Rings, Shadows, Saturn

Dione, Rings, Shadows, Saturn: APOD: 2015 August 24 - Dione, Rings, Shadows, Saturn



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2015 August 24


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Dione, Rings, Shadows, Saturn
Image Credit: Cassini Imaging Team, SSI, JPL, ESA, NASA
Explanation: What's happening in this strange juxtaposition of moon and planet? First and foremost, Saturn's moon Dione was captured here in a dramatic panorama by the robotic Cassini spacecraft currently orbiting the giant planet. The bright and cratered moon itself spans about 1100-km, with the large multi-ringed crater Evander visible on the lower right. Since the rings of Saturn are seen here nearly edge-on, they are directly visible only as a thin horizontal line that passes behind Dione. Arcing across the bottom of the image, however, are shadows of Saturn's rings, showing some of the rich texture that could not be seen directly. In the background, few cloud features are visible on Saturn. The featured image was taken during the last planned flyby of Dione by Cassini, as the spacecraft is scheduled to dive into Saturn's atmosphere during 2017.

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Tomorrow's picture: skyfall washington
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Meteors and Milky Way over Mount Ranier

Meteors and Milky Way over Mount Ranier: APOD: 2015 August 25 - Meteors and Milky Way over Mount Rainier



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2015 August 25


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Meteors and Milky Way over Mount Rainier
Image Credit & Copyright: Matthew Dieterich
Explanation: Despite appearances, the sky is not falling. Two weeks ago, however, tiny bits of comet dust were. Featured here is the Perseids meteor shower as captured over Mt. Rainier, Washington, USA. The image was created from a two-hour time lapse video, snaring over 20 meteors, including one that brightened dramatically on the image left. Although each meteor train typically lasts less than a second, the camera was able to capture their color progressions as they disintegrated in the Earth's atmosphere. Here an initial green tint may be indicative of small amounts of glowing magnesium atoms that were knocked off the meteor by atoms in the Earth's atmosphere. To cap things off, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy was simultaneously photographed rising straight up behind the snow-covered peak of Mt. Rainier. Another good meteor shower is expected in mid-November when debris from a different comet intersects Earth as the Leonids.

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Tomorrow's picture: hanging out
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The Large Cloud of Magellan

The Large Cloud of Magellan: APOD: 2015 August 27 - The Large Cloud of Magellan



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2015 August 27


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The Large Cloud of Magellan
Image Credit & Copyright: Carlos Fairbairn
Explanation: The 16th century Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan and his crew had plenty of time to study the southern sky during the first circumnavigation of planet Earth. As a result, two fuzzy cloud-like objects easily visible to southern hemisphere skygazers are known as the Clouds of Magellan, now understood to be satellite galaxies of our much larger, spiral Milky Way galaxy. About 160,000 light-years distant in the constellation Dorado, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is seen here in a remarkably deep, colorful, image. Spanning about 15,000 light-years or so, it is the most massive of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies and is the home of the closest supernova in modern times, SN 1987A. The prominent patch below center is 30 Doradus, also known as the magnificent Tarantula Nebula, is a giant star-forming region about 1,000 light-years across.

Tomorrow's picture: Puppis A
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Puppis A Supernova Remnant

Puppis A Supernova Remnant: APOD: 2015 August 28 - Puppis A Supernova Remnant



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2015 August 28


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Puppis A Supernova Remnant
Image Credit & Copyright: Don Goldman
Explanation: Driven by the explosion of a massive star, supernova remnant Puppis A is blasting into the surrounding interstellar medium about 7,000 light-years away. At that distance, this colorful telescopic field based on broadband and narrowband optical image data is about 60 light-years across. As the supernova remnant expands into its clumpy, non-uniform surroundings, shocked filaments of oxygen atoms glow in green-blue hues. Hydrogen and nitrogen are in red. Light from the initial supernova itself, triggered by the collapse of the massive star's core, would have reached Earth about 3,700 years ago. The Puppis A remnant is actually seen through outlying emission from the closer but more ancient Vela supernova remnant, near the crowded plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Still glowing across the electromagnetic spectrum Puppis A remains one of the brightest sources in the X-ray sky.

Tomorrow's picture: seagull nebula
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The Seagull Nebula

The Seagull Nebula: APOD: 2015 August 29 - The Seagull Nebula



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2015 August 29


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The Seagull Nebula
Image Credit & Copyright: Dieter Willasch (Astro-Cabinet)
Explanation: A broad expanse of glowing gas and dust presents a bird-like visage to astronomers from planet Earth, suggesting its popular moniker - The Seagull Nebula. This portrait of the cosmic bird covers a 1.6 degree wide swath across the plane of the Milky Way, near the direction of Sirius, alpha star of the constellation Canis Major. Of course, the region includes objects with other catalog designations: notably NGC 2327, a compact, dusty emission region with an embedded massive star that forms the bird's head (aka the Parrot Nebula, above center). Dominated by the reddish glow of atomic hydrogen, the complex of gas and dust clouds with bright young stars spans over 100 light-years at an estimated 3,800 light-year distance.

Tomorrow's picture: ancient stars
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M31: The Andromeda Galaxy

M31: The Andromeda Galaxy:

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2015 August 30


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Explanation: What is the nearest major galaxy to our own Milky Way Galaxy? Andromeda. In fact, our Galaxy is thought to look much like Andromeda. Together these two galaxies dominate the Local Group of galaxies. The diffuse light from Andromeda is caused by the hundreds of billions of stars that compose it. The several distinct stars that surround Andromeda's image are actually stars in our Galaxy that are well in front of the background object. Andromeda is frequently referred to as M31 since it is the 31st object on Messier's list of diffuse sky objects. M31 is so distant it takes about two million years for light to reach us from there. Although visible without aid, the above image of M31 is a digital mosaic of 20 frames taken with a small telescope. Much about M31 remains unknown, including exactly how long it will before it collides with our home galaxy.

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Pluto in Enhanced Color

Pluto in Enhanced Color: APOD: 2015 August 31 - Pluto in Enhanced Color



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2015 August 31


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Pluto in Enhanced Color
Image Credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest Research Inst.
Explanation: Pluto is more colorful than we can see. Color data and images of our Solar System's most famous dwarf planet, taken by the robotic New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby in July, have been digitally combined to give an enhanced view of this ancient world sporting an unexpectedly young surface. The featured enhanced color image is not only esthetically pretty but scientifically useful, making surface regions of differing chemical composition visually distinct. For example, the light-colored heart-shaped Tombaugh Regio on the lower right is clearly shown here to be divisible into two regions that are geologically different, with the leftmost lobe Sputnik Planum also appearing unusually smooth. New Horizons now continues on beyond Pluto, will continue to beam back more images and data, and will soon be directed to change course so that it can fly past asteroid 2014 MU69 in 2019 January.

Pluto Images with Brief Explanations: APOD Pluto Search
Tomorrow's picture: through the earth
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Distant Neutrinos Detected Below Antarctic Ice

Distant Neutrinos Detected Below Antarctic Ice:

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2015 September 1


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Explanation: From where do these neutrinos come? The IceCube Neutrino Observatory near the South Pole of the Earth has begun to detect nearly invisible particles of very high energy. Although these rarely-interacting neutrinos pass through much of the Earth just before being detected, where they started remains a mystery. Pictured here is IceCube's Antarctic lab accompanied by a cartoon depicting long strands of detectors frozen into the crystal clear ice below. Candidate origins for these cosmic neutrinos include the violent surroundings of supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies, and tremendous stellar explosions culminating in supernovas and gamma ray bursts far across the universe. As IceCube detects increasingly more high energy neutrinos, correlations with known objects may resolve this cosmic conundrum -- or we may never know.

Posted by Nelio Inacio at 4:51 PM 0 comments

The Flare and the Galaxy

The Flare and the Galaxy:

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2015 September 2
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Explanation: Is this person throwing a lightning bolt? No. Despite appearances, this person is actually pointing in the direction of a bright Iridium flare, a momentary reflection of sunlight off of a communications satellite in orbit around the Earth. As the Iridium satellite orbits, reflective antennas became aligned between the observer and the Sun to create a flash brighter than any star in the night sky. Iridium flares typically last several seconds, longer than most meteors. Also unlike meteors, the flares are symmetric and predictable. The featured flare involved Iridium satellite 15 and occurred over southern Estonia last week. In this well-planned image, a spectacular night sky appears in the background, complete with the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy running vertically up the image center.

Posted by Nelio Inacio at 4:48 PM 0 comments

Arp 159 and NGC 4725

Arp 159 and NGC 4725: APOD: 2015 September 3 - Arp 159 and NGC 4725



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2015 September 3


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Arp 159 and NGC 4725
Image Credit & Copyright: Stephen Leshin
Explanation: Pointy stars and peculiar galaxies span this cosmic snapshot, a telescopic view toward the well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. Bright enough to show off diffraction spikes, the stars are in the foreground of the scene, well within our own Milky Way. But the two prominent galaxies lie far beyond our own, some 41 million light-years distant. Also known as NGC 4747, the smaller distorted galaxy at left is the 159th entry in the Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, with extensive tidal tails indicative of strong gravitational interactions in its past. At about a 100,000 light-years across, its likely companion on the right is the much larger NGC 4725. At first glance NGC 4725 appears to be a normal spiral galaxy, its central region dominated by the yellowish light of cool, older stars giving way to younger hot blue star clusters along dusty spiral outskirts. Still, NGC 4725 does look a little odd with only one main spiral arm.

Tomorrow's picture: in southern skies
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Milky Way with Airglow Australis

Milky Way with Airglow Australis: APOD: 2015 September 4 - Milky Way with Airglow Australis



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2015 September 4


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Milky Way with Airglow Australis
Image Credit & Copyright: Yuri Beletsky (Carnegie Las Campanas Observatory)
Explanation: After sunset on September 1, an exceptionally intense, reddish airglow flooded this Chilean winter night skyscape. Above a sea of clouds and flanking the celestial Milky Way, the airglow seems to ripple and flow across the northern horizon in atmospheric waves. Originating at an altitude similar to aurorae, the luminous airglow is instead due to chemiluminescence, the production of light through chemical excitation. Commonly captured with a greenish tinge by sensitive digital cameras, this reddish airglow emission is from OH molecules and oxygen atoms at extremely low densities and has often been present in southern hemisphere nights during the last few years. On this night it was visible to the eye, but seen without color. Antares and the central Milky Way lie near the top, with bright star Arcturus at left. Straddling the Milky Way close to the horizon are Vega, Deneb, and Altair, known in northern nights as the stars of the Summer Triangle.

Tomorrow's picture: Atlas V with plume noctilucent
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Posted by Nelio Inacio at 4:45 PM 0 comments

Atlas V Rising

Atlas V Rising:

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2015 September 5


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Explanation: Early morning risers along Florida's Space Coast, planet Earth, were treated to a launch spectacle on September 2nd. Before dawn an Atlas V rocket rose into still dark skies carrying a US Navy communications satellite from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station into Earth orbit. This minutes long exposure follows the rocket's arc climbing eastward over the Atlantic. As the rocket rises above Earth's shadow, its fiery trail becomes an eerie, noctilucent exhaust plume glinting in sunlight. Of course, the short, bright startrail just above the cloud bank is Venus rising, now appearing in planet Earth's skies as the brilliant morning star.

Posted by Nelio Inacio at 4:45 PM 0 comments

Earthrise

Earthrise: APOD: 2015 September 6 - Earthrise



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2015 September 6


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Earthrise
Image Credit: Apollo 8, NASA
Explanation: What's that rising over the edge of the Moon? Earth. About 47 years ago, in December of 1968, the Apollo 8 crew flew from the Earth to the Moon and back again. Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders were launched atop a Saturn V rocket on December 21, circled the Moon ten times in their command module, and returned to Earth on December 27. The Apollo 8 mission's impressive list of firsts includes: the first humans to journey to the Earth's Moon, the first to fly using the Saturn V rocket, and the first to photograph the Earth from deep space. As the Apollo 8 command module rounded the farside of the Moon, the crew could look toward the lunar horizon and see the Earth appear to rise, due to their spacecraft's orbital motion. Their famous picture of a distant blue Earth above the Moon's limb was a marvelous gift to the world.

Tomorrow's picture: large predator
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Posted by Nelio Inacio at 4:43 PM 0 comments

Distorted Green Flash Sunset over Italy

Distorted Green Flash Sunset over Italy: APOD: 2015 September 8 - Distorted Green Flash Sunset over Italy



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2015 September 8


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Distorted Green Flash Sunset over Italy
Image Credit & Copyright: Paolo Lazzarotti
Explanation: This was one strange sunset. For one thing, the typically round Sun appeared distorted, geometrically, and multiply layered. For another, some of these layers appeared unusually green. The Sun, of course, was just fine -- its odd appearance was caused entirely by its light refracting in the Earth's atmosphere. When layers of the Earth's atmosphere are unusually warm, layers of the Sun may appear distorted or even seen multiple times. The effect is most strong nearest sunrise and sunset when terrestrial inversion layers occupy distinct altitudes above the horizon. Different colors of the Sun may also become deflected by significantly different amounts, so that the uppermost superior image may appear momentarily green -- a phenomenon known as a green flash. The featured image was taken in February from Porto Venere, Italy, with San Pietro church situated in the foreground.

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Tomorrow's picture: galaxy wreckage
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NGC 4372 and the Dark Doodad

NGC 4372 and the Dark Doodad:

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2015 September 10


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Explanation: The delightful Dark Doodad Nebula drifts through southern skies, a tantalizing target for binoculars in the constellation Musca, The Fly. The dusty cosmic cloud is seen against rich starfields just south of the prominent Coalsack Nebula and the Southern Cross. Stretching for about 3 degrees across this scene the Dark Doodad is punctuated at its southern tip (lower left) by globular star cluster NGC 4372. Of course NGC 4372 roams the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy, a background object some 20,000 light-years away and only by chance along our line-of-sight to the Dark Doodad. The Dark Doodad's well defined silhouette belongs to the Musca molecular cloud, but its better known alliterative moniker was first coined by astro-imager and writer Dennis di Cicco in 1986 while observing Comet Halley from the Australian outback. The Dark Doodad is around 700 light-years distant and over 30 light-years long.

Posted by Nelio Inacio at 4:42 PM 0 comments

A Giant Squid in the Flying Bat

A Giant Squid in the Flying Bat: APOD: 2015 September 11 - A Giant Squid in the Flying Bat



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2015 September 11


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A Giant Squid in the Flying Bat
Image Credit & Copyright: Steve Cannistra (StarryWonders)
Explanation: Very faint but also very large on planet Earth's sky, a giant Squid Nebula cataloged as Ou4, and Sh2-129 also known as the Flying Bat Nebula, are both caught in this scene toward the royal constellation Cepheus. Composed with a total of 20 hours of broadband and narrowband data, the telescopic field of view is almost 4 degrees or 8 Full Moons across. Discovered in 2011 by French astro-imager Nicolas Outters, the Squid Nebula's alluring bipolar shape is distinguished here by the telltale blue-green emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms. Though apparently completely surrounded by the reddish hydrogen emission region Sh2-129, the true distance and nature of the Squid Nebula have been difficult to determine. Still, a recent investigation suggests Ou4 really does lie within Sh2-129 some 2,300 light-years away. Consistent with that scenario, Ou4 would represent a spectacular outflow driven by HR8119, a triple system of hot, massive stars seen near the center of the nebula. If so, the truly giant Squid Nebula would physically be nearly 50 light-years across.

Tomorrow's picture: two for one
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