Starship Asterisk*

Nell wrote:The above phrase, used in the caption for "M1: The Crab Nebula from Hubble", needs elaboration. What colors represent what elements? Does a given color always represent the same element in all astronomical photographs? Is there a basic astronomical color reference page? I like the colors; they help me to "see". If, however, they represent each photographer's whim and are subject to random change, then this viewer needs a guiding statement in each photograph for clarification.

Thanks for all help.

Run wrote:Where is the M1 neutron star position in this magnificent photo?

geckzilla wrote:

kovil wrote:(nonsense snipped)

You just called all of these cosmic features things like dinner plates, salad plates, china water pitchers, and puff balls. You can't even explain anything without resorting to quotation marks. I'm not a scientist but you don't make a bit of sense.

kovil wrote:If we had a movie of the Crab Nebula,
it would start out as a very large star, much like eta Carinae;

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080617.html

Eta Carinae is thought to be 100-150 times more massive than our Sun.
In the above APOD, eta Carinae the star, is in the middle, between the two big white 'puff balls' on the red background, but you can't actually see it as the foreground white cloud obscures it.
Orthogonally (perpendicular) to the long axis thru the white clouds, there's a 'disk' of material that is extending out about 1/2 as far as the white clouds go. Like a dinner plate with two china water pitchers opposite each other, sitting on front and back of the plate. (not a great metaphore, yeah) two really big puffball mushrooms on opposite sides of a salad plate !

The disk of material I'm referencing as the dinner plate, only shows an 11 o'clock and a 4 o'clock spike of material that shows in this photo. You can see a little more of it in a purple color, sort of. The photo's wavelength of sensitivity only shows this much, there's more to see in other frequencies of the EM spectum.

There is an 'energy connection' between the two white clouds, the dinner plate disk, and eta Carinae.
There is an electric double layer close to the star as well.

What happened to the star in the Crab Nebula, that is now the pulsar, is that it's electric double layer 'failed' and exploded during a catastrophic 'short circuit', and that is what caused the 'explosion' and the subsequent Crab Nebula structure. This scenario also accounts for the inexplicable 'mysterious filaments' that standard astrophysics doesn't understand why they formed and are there, and also so tenuous.

Unfortunately, Mainstream Astrophysics is about a hundred years behind the times in understanding; massive stars, supernovas, planetary nebulas, and even our own Sun's heliosphere and heliopause's interaction with the interstellar medium within our galaxy.

bystander wrote:Post by bystander on Sun Oct 25, 2009 2:57 pm
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap091025.html

bluebird wrote:Today's APOD posting of the Crab Nebula made me wonder what a "movie" of it might look like. We have had years of Hubble pictures and pre-Hubble pictures that might be stitched together at regular time intervals to create a "movie view" of the Crab Nebula and how it is changing over the years. Such an exercise might also invite extrapolation backwards to 1054 when it all began. Is there anything like that already out there? A "movie view" might provide better insights into the dynamics of the nebula.

Nell wrote:What colors represent what elements?

The newly composed image was assembled from (24) individual Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 exposures taken in October 1999, January 2000, and December 2000. The colours in the image indicate the different elements that were expelled during the explosion. Blue indicates neutral oxygen, green singly ionised sulphur and red doubly ionised oxygen. The Hubble data have been superimposed onto images taken with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory, Chile.