Starship Asterisk*

This stunning ultra high-definition fish-eye/fulldome image shows the Chajnantor plateau, place of ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array), which consists of 66 antennas. Above the array, the bright band of the Milky Way shines with all its fascinating details.

Active regions on the sun combined to look something like a jack-o-lantern’s face on Oct. 8, 2014. The image was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, which watches the sun at all times from its orbit in space.

The active regions in this image appear brighter because those are areas that emit more light and energy. They are markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona. This image blends together two sets of extreme ultraviolet wavelengths at 171 and 193 Ångströms, typically colorized in gold and yellow, to create a particularly Halloween-like appearance.

This spectacular image was captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The bright streak slicing across the frame is an edge-on view of galaxy NGC 4762, and a number of other distant galaxies can be seen scattered in the background.

NGC 4762 lies about 58 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin). It is part of the Virgo Cluster, hence its alternative designation of VCC 2095 for Virgo Cluster Catalogue entry. This catalogue is a listing of just over 2000 galaxies in the area of the Virgo Cluster. The Virgo Cluster is actually prominently situated, and lies at the centre of the larger Virgo supercluster, of which our galaxy group, the Local Group, is a member.

Previously thought to be a barred spiral galaxy, NGC 4762 has since been found to be a lenticular galaxy, a kind of intermediate step between an elliptical and a spiral. The edge-on view that we have of this particular galaxy makes it difficult to determine its true shape, but astronomers have found the galaxy to consist of four main components — a central bulge, a bar, a thick disc and an outer ring.

The galaxy's disc is asymmetric and warped, which could potentially be explained by NGC 4762 violently cannibalising a smaller galaxy in the past. The remains of this former companion may then have settled within NGC 4762's disc, redistributing the gas and stars and so changing the disc's morphology.

NGC 4762 also contains a Liner-type Active Galactic Nucleus, a highly energetic central region. This nucleus is detectable due to its particular spectral line emission, which acts as a type of "atomic fingerprint", allowing astronomers to measure the composition of the region.

A solitary laser beam cuts through the night sky. It streaks upwards from Unit Telescope 4 of ESO's Very Large Telescope, located at Paranal Observatory in Chile. The two Magellanic Clouds are visible to the left of the beam as faint, fuzzy patches against the starry background. The particularly bright star to the right of the beam is Canopus, the second brightest star in our night sky after Sirius. ...

Sandgirl wrote:Field in southern Orion Nebula
Copyrights: Marco Antonio Moreno Yuste
Suggested by: Joan Lluís Ferrer - AGRUPACIÓ ASTRONÒMICA D'EIVISSA
Larger size: http://www.agrupacionastronomicaibiza.com/

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starsurfer wrote:

Nitpicker wrote:I've only ever imaged the Tarantula Nebula once, with an off-the-shelf, unmodified, unfiltered, RGB colour DSLR (through a telescope). It was produced in my characteristic noisy and distorted style, with only a few minutes of data and 30 second subs. But the nebula looks to be much the same colour blue:

DSO_Dor_N_NGC2070_Tarantula_20140305_2140+10_reduced.jpg

There is actually a lot of blueness to the Tarantula Nebula due to the immense amount of OIII emission. For some reason, many amateurs images reduce the blueness and make it look typically red under the incorrect assumption that because it is an emission nebula, it only contains hydrogen. The LMC (and the SMC to a lesser extent) is full of ionized oxygen!

This neat little galaxy is known as NGC 4526. Its dark lanes of dust and bright diffuse glow make the galaxy appear to hang like a halo in the emptiness of space in this new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Although this image paints a picture of serenity, the galaxy is anything but. It is one of the brightest lenticular galaxies known, a category that lies somewhere between spirals and ellipticals. It has hosted two known supernova explosions, one in 1969 and another in 1994, and is known to have a colossal supermassive black hole at its centre that has the mass of 450 million Suns.

NGC 4526 is part of the Virgo cluster of galaxies. Ground-based observations of galaxies in this cluster have revealed that a quarter of these galaxies seem to have rapidly rotating discs of gas at their centres. The most spectacular of these is this galaxy, NGC 4526, whose spinning disc of gas, dust, and stars reaches out uniquely far from its heart, spanning some 7% of the galaxy's entire radius.

This disc is moving incredibly fast, spinning at more than 250 kilometres per second. The dynamics of this quickly whirling region were actually used to infer the mass of NGC 4526’s central black hole — a technique that had not been used before to constrain a galaxy’s central black hole.

This image was taken using Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.

Nitpicker wrote:I've only ever imaged the Tarantula Nebula once, with an off-the-shelf, unmodified, unfiltered, RGB colour DSLR (through a telescope). It was produced in my characteristic noisy and distorted style, with only a few minutes of data and 30 second subs. But the nebula looks to be much the same colour blue:

DSO_Dor_N_NGC2070_Tarantula_20140305_2140+10_reduced.jpg

starsurfer wrote:

geckzilla wrote:

starsurfer wrote:In my opinion, there are a lot better targets/regions in the LMC that they could have chosen to take an image of.

That was a parallel observation. The telescope can rotate around so that the parallel field can be anywhere in a circle around the primary observation but other than that there isn't much of a choice where the parallel field is aimed at.

I didn't know that, thanks for the extra information!

You ARE nice!