Starship Asterisk*

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA -- Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt

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Though the bright, light-speckled foreground galaxy on the left is eye-catching, it is far from the most intriguing object in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image. In the upper part of the frame, the light from distant galaxies has been smeared and twisted into odd shapes, arcs, and streaks. This phenomenon indicates the presence of a giant galaxy cluster, which is bending the light coming from the galaxies behind it with its monstrous gravitational influence.

This cluster, called SDSS J0150+2725, lies some three billion light-years away and was first documented by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), hence its name. The SDSS uses a 2.5-metre optical telescope located at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico to observe millions of objects and create detailed 3D maps of the Universe. This particular cluster was part of the Sloan Giant Arcs Survey (SGAS), which detected galaxy clusters with strong lensing properties; their gravity stretches and warps the light of more distant galaxies sitting behind them, creating weird and spectacular arcs such as those seen here.

The Hubble data on of SDSS J0150+2725 were part of a study of star formation in brightest cluster galaxies (called BCGs), lying between approximately 2 and 6 billion light-years away. This study found the star formation rate in these galaxies to be low, which is consistent with models that suggest that most stars in such galaxies form very early on. These BCGs also emit strong radio signals thought to be from active galactic nuclei (AGN) at their centers, suggesting that the activity from both the AGN and any ongoing star formation is fueled by cold gas found within the host galaxies.

Credit: ESO/VVV Survey/D. Minniti -- Acknowledgement: Ignacio Toledo

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A sinister smile appears amid a sea of stars in this image — a small portion of a gigantic gigapixel colour mosaic of the Milky Way’s heart. Comprised of thousands of incredibly detailed images taken by ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), the mosaic reveals more of the stars at the Milky Way’s heart than ever before.

VISTA was chosen due to its extremely sensitive infrared camera, which can see through most of the dust that blocks our view towards the centre of the galaxy. What we see in this image is a dense patch of gas and dust — a nebula — that even VISTA’s camera cannot see through. Located near the Lagoon Nebula (not seen), it appears to wink back as it mischievously blocks out the light from background stars.

The full image contains almost nine billion pixels, and is part of the Vista Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) survey, a project to image the Milky Way’s bulge and disc at near-infrared wavelengths. To create the colour mosaic, images at three different wavelengths were seamlessly combined. The full zoomable image can be explored online.

Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Fillipenko

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This pretty, cloud-like object may not look much like a galaxy — it lacks the well-defined arms of a spiral galaxy, or the reddish bulge of an elliptical — but it is in fact something known as a lenticular galaxy. Lenticular galaxies sit somewhere between the spiral and elliptical types; they are disc-shaped, like spirals, but they no longer form large numbers of new stars and thus contain only ageing populations of stars, like ellipticals.

NGC 2655’s core is extremely luminous, resulting in its additional classification as a Seyfert galaxy: a type of active galaxy with strong and characteristic emission lines. This luminosity is thought to be produced as matter is dragged onto the accretion disc of a supermassive black hole sitting at the centre of NGC 2655. The structure of NGC 2655’s outer disc, on the other hand, appears calmer, but it is oddly-shaped. The complex dynamics of the gas in the galaxy suggest that it may have had a turbulent past, including mergers and interactions with other galaxies.

NGC 2655 is located about 80 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Camelopardalis (The Giraffe). Camelopardalis contains many other interesting deep-sky objects, including the open cluster NGC 1502, the elegant Kemble’s Cascade asterism, and the starburst galaxy NGC 2146.

Image Credit: Petr Horálek/ESO

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This unusual image shows three of the telescopes sited at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile — the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope on the left, ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope sitting in the distance behind it, and the Danish 1.54-metre telescope on the right, apparently looming over its companions in the foreground.

Of course, this is a highly distorted view of the telescopes! This photograph was taken by ESO Photo Ambassador Petr Horálek to emphasise not the telescopes themselves but the stunning features of the night sky above the observatory site, which is one of the best in the world. This is a long-exposure shot intended to capture the apparent motion of the stars as they circle slowly overhead in the sky. Over time, the stars appear to drag out trails of light in the sky — known as star trails — painting large circles onto the dark cosmos (this phenomenon is actually caused by the rotation of the Earth, not by the movement of the stars themselves)

The star trails shown here are centred on a point in the sky known as the south celestial pole, which here hides behind the dome of the Danish 1.54-metre telescope. The celestial pole is a point on the sky aligned with the rotational axis of our planet. These trails were actually captured in a separate image which was then combined with the image of the telescopes, adding a rather disconcerting spinning sensation to the resulting composite. The image also highlights the majesty of the Milky Way as it snakes across the sky, accompanied by the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (the two bright smudges).

The Milky Way, as viewed from the Northern Hemisphere
FECYT / IAC / J.C. Casado / D. Padrón / M. Serra-Ricart

Javier Barbuzano wrote:

This is what the largest available image of the Milky Way using only off-the-shelf photographic equipment looks like.

The Canary Islands, a Spanish enclave off the coast of North Africa, are famous as a favorite vacationing spot for Sun-deprived northern Europeans. But they’re also a prime location for astronomy, hosting two observatories on mountaintops that benefit from exceptionally clear and dark skies.

Taking advantage of such a privileged environment, a small team of two astrophotographers and a professional astronomer have embarked on a project to produce a massive image of the Milky Way using only off-the-shelf photographic equipment.

The team has already gathered and put together nearly 6,000 images, acquired over the course of a year and covering 70% of the Milky Way. The result is a result is a 4.37-gigapixel panoramic view of our host galaxy. To get the full picture, the team will travel to Namibia for more observations before the end of 2018...

bystander wrote: ↑Thu Apr 19, 2018 2:29 pm Hubble 28th Anniversary Image Captures Roiling Heart of Vast Stellar Nursery
NASA | STScI | HubbleSite | 2018 Apr 19

Click to view full size image 1 or image 2

Lagoon Nebula: Visible Light/Infrared
Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI

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Hubble celebrates 28th anniversary in style with stunning view of Lagoon Nebula

For 28 years, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been delivering breathtaking views of the universe. Although the telescope has made more than 1.5 million observations of over 40,000 space objects, it is still uncovering stunning celestial gems.

The latest offering is this image of the Lagoon Nebula to celebrate the telescope’s anniversary. Hubble shows this vast stellar nursery in stunning unprecedented detail.

At the center of the photo, a monster young star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust. This region epitomizes a typical, raucous stellar nursery full of birth and destruction.

Hubble celebrates 28th anniversary with a trip through the Lagoon Nebula
ESA Hubble Photo Release | 2018 Apr 19

Click to view full size image 1 or image 2

Lagoon Nebula: Visible Light/Infrared
Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI

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Hubble celebrates 28th anniversary in style with stunning view of Lagoon Nebula

For 28 years, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been delivering breathtaking views of the universe. Although the telescope has made more than 1.5 million observations of over 40,000 space objects, it is still uncovering stunning celestial gems.

The latest offering is this image of the Lagoon Nebula to celebrate the telescope’s anniversary. Hubble shows this vast stellar nursery in stunning unprecedented detail.

At the center of the photo, a monster young star 200,000 times brighter than our Sun is blasting powerful ultraviolet radiation and hurricane-like stellar winds, carving out a fantasy landscape of ridges, cavities, and mountains of gas and dust. This region epitomizes a typical, raucous stellar nursery full of birth and destruction.

Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, RELICS

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This intriguing image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a massive galaxy cluster called PSZ2 G138.61-10.84, about six billion light-years away. Galaxies are not randomly distributed in space, but rather aggregated in groups, clusters and superclusters. The latter span over hundreds of millions of light-years and contain billions of galaxies.

Our own galaxy, for example, is part of the Local Group, which in turn is part of the giant Laniakea Supercluster. It was thanks to Hubble that we were able to study massive galactic superstructures such as the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall; a giant galaxy cluster that contains billions of galaxies and extends 10 billion light-years across — making it the biggest known structure in the Universe.

This image was taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3) as part of an observing programme called RELICS (Reionization Lensing Cluster Survey). RELICS imaged 41 massive galaxy clusters with the aim of finding the brightest distant galaxies for the forthcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study.

Image Credit: Petr Horálek / ESO

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This breathtaking view of ESO’s Paranal Observatory reveals a spectacular night scene over part of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the observatory’s most famous resident. The telescope sitting centre stage is one of the VLT’s four Unit Telescopes (UT). The VLT comprises both these UTs and four additional, movable, Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs).

However impressive the VLT may be, the closed telescope is trumped in this image by the skies overhead — most prominently by the colourful plane of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, as it arches across the frame and creates a celestial rainbow.

Part of the sky is tinted a faint green colour due to a phenomenon known as airglow, and the two smudges of the Magellanic Clouds can be seen to the left of the UT. The famous constellation of Orion (The Hunter) is visible to the right of centre, the bright stars of which can be used to find the stars comprising other constellations and asterisms. Drawing an imaginary line down through Orion’s Belt reveals the red star Aldebaran, part of the constellation of Taurus (The Bull). Further along this imaginary line, down towards the horizon, the Pleiades star cluster — important in many cultures and civilisations — can be seen. Above Orion are the three bright stars making up the Winter Triangle asterism: Sirius, Betelgeuse and Procyon.