Found Images: 2018 July

[geckzilla]

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Have you seen a great image or video somewhere that you think would make a great APOD? Nominate it for APOD! Please post as much information here as you have about the image/video with a link to any source(s) for it you know of here, and the editors will take a look.

When posting the image itself, please do not post anything larger than a thumbnail here; please honor the copyright holder's copyright.

Please keep hotlinked images under 400K.

Thank you!

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[starsurfer]

NGC 7129 and NGC 7142
http://www.cxielo.ch/gallery/v/nebulae/ ... x.jpg.html
Copyright: Martin Rusterholz

[starsurfer]

Abell 72
http://www.pbase.com/skybox/image/166928668
Copyright: Kevin Quin

[bystander]

ALMA Spies a New Planetary Nursery
ESO Picture of the Week | ALMA | 2018 Jul 02

Credit: ESO/R. Dong et al.; ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

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This image from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) shows MWC 758, a young star that is approaching adulthood and surrounded by knotty, irregular rings of cosmic dust, three of which can be seen here. Unusually, these rings are elliptical in shape rather than being perfectly circular — making this the first discovery of an intrinsically elliptical protoplanetary disc with ALMA!

The outer and inner rings each contain one particularly bright clump, visible as arcs of yellow. Additionally there appear to be spiral arms traced out within the dust, as well as a core dust-free cavity that is slightly off-centre. These are all features that hint at the presence of unseen planets. As planets form, they gravitationally interact with the disc and create various telltale features and structures. Astronomers can thus observe a system like MWC 758 and not only infer the existence of potential hidden planets, but also estimate their masses, locations, and orbits.

This is a wonderful example of the planet-finding power of ALMA. Using the observatory to study such dusty discs allows scientists to investigate the very first stages of planet formation in a bid to understand how these infant systems form and evolve. Learning more about planetary systems throughout the cosmos may help us know more about how the Solar System formed, and how it evolved to become the cosmic home we live in today.

viewtopic.php?t=38389

[bystander]

Zooming in on the Early Universe
ESA Hubble Picture of the Week | 2018 Jul 02

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, RELICS

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This busy image is a treasure trove of wonders. Bright stars from the Milky Way sparkle in the foreground, the magnificent swirls of several spiral galaxies are visible across the frame, and a glowing assortment of objects at the centre make up a massive galaxy cluster. Such clusters are the biggest objects in the Universe that are held together by gravity, and can contain thousands of galaxies of all shapes and sizes. Typically, they have a mass of about one million billion times the mass of the Sun — unimaginably huge!

Their incredible mass makes clusters very useful natural tools to test theories in astronomy, such as Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This tells us that objects with mass warp the fabric of spacetime around them; the more massive the object, the greater the distortion. An enormous galaxy cluster like this one therefore has a huge influence on the spacetime around it, even distorting the light from more distant galaxies to change a galaxy’s apparent shape, creating multiple images, and amplifying the galaxy’s light — a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

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.

[SpookyAstro]

Cosmic Firework, Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant DSS-II Combo by Transient Astronomer, on Flickr

Image Credit and Copyright DSS-II / Tom Masterson

[starsurfer]

Ced 111
http://www.astro-austral.cl/imagenes/ne ... O/info.htm
Copyright: José Joaquin Perez

[starsurfer]

NGC 2022
http://www.caelumobservatory.com/gallery/n2022.shtml
Copyright: Adam Block/Mount Lemmon SkyCenter/University of Arizona

[starsurfer]

Cat's Paw Nebula (NGC 6334)
http://www.cielaustral.com/galerie/photo74.htm
Copyright: Ciel Austral

[starsurfer]

Rho Ophiuchi Nebula (IC 4604)
https://www.astrobin.com/166944/
Copyright: John Gleason

[Ann]

NGC 5866
http://www.caelumobservatory.com/gallery/n5866.shtml
Copyright: Adam Block

Click to view full size image

Note the very thin, very short dark dust lane of this fantastic galaxy. Note how a thin disk of moderately bluish stars emerges from the dust lane. Note how the left side of the bluish disk appears to end in a yellowish puff. And, of course, note all the jets and streams shooting out in various directions apparently from the center of the galaxy.

Amazing!

Ann

[starsurfer]

NGC 4388
http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1649a/
Copyright: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Click to view full size image

This galaxy has jets of hydrogen!

[starsurfer]

vdB149
http://www.astroimager.net/Page-AP160-CCD-425.html
Copyright: Jim Janusz

[starsurfer]

NGC 2899
http://www.capella-observatory.com/Imag ... GC2899.htm
Copyright: Rainer Sparenberg, Stefan Binnewies and Volker Robering

[starsurfer]

Bernes 149
https://astrodonimaging.com/gallery/bernes-149/
Copyright: Don Goldman

[bystander]

Swimming Moon
ESO Picture of the Week | 2018 Jul 09

This photo montage shows a familiar cosmic object — the Moon — in a very unfamiliar way.

Image Credit: Petr Horálek / ESO

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ESO Photo Ambassador Petr Horálek captured this photoset while visiting ESO’s high-altitude Paranal Observatory in Chile, where skies are remarkably clear. He snapped photographs of this striking blood-red moonset at five-second intervals, watching as the Moon sank through the dark sky before finally dipping below the horizon (the frames are ordered chronologically from left to right, and top to bottom).

The prominent red colour of these images is due to the phenomenon of atmospheric refraction. As the Moon approaches the horizon, its reflected light must traverse more and more of the atmosphere before reaching our eyes, meaning that scattering becomes more prominent — in other words, there is more air for the light to push through, and more light is scattered. Of all the colours of visible light, the Earth’s atmosphere scatters and refracts red light the least due to its longer wavelength, casting sunsets and moonsets in a characteristic orange-red hue.

Alongside the colour, the other notable feature of this image is the apparent rippling effect — the Moon appears to be melting! Again, this is an atmospheric effect; light rays are here unusually and unevenly refracted by layers of air with different densities, temperatures, pressures, humidities, and so on. The shape of the Moon also appears flattened due to the lensing power of the atmosphere, which pushes the lower sections upwards to create an oval or egg-like shape. These phenomena are all caused by differential refraction — essentially, each layer of the Earth’s atmosphere deals with the Moon’s light differently, resulting in this distorted, belted effect.

[bystander]

A Failed Supernova?
ESA Hubble Picture of the Week | 2018 Jul 09

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

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Glowing warmly against the dark backdrop of the Universe, this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows an irregular galaxy called UGC 12682. Located approximately 70 million light-years away in the constellation of Pegasus (The Winged Horse), UGC 12682 is distorted and oddly-structured, with bright pockets of star formation.

In November 2008, 14-year-old Caroline Moore from New York discovered a supernova in UGC 12682. This made her the youngest person at the time to have discovered a supernova. Follow-up observations by professional astronomers of the so-called SN 2008ha showed that it was peculiarly interesting in many different ways: its host galaxy UGC 12862 rarely produces supernovae. It is one of the faintest supernovae ever observed and after the explosion it expanded very slowly, suggesting that the explosion did not release copious amounts of energy as usually expected.

Astronomers have now classified SN 2008ha as a subclass of a Type Ia supernova, which is the explosion of a white dwarf that hungrily accretes matter from a companion star. SN 2008ha may have been the result of a partially failed supernova, explaining why the explosion failed to decimate the whole star.

[starsurfer]

NGC 4725 and LoTr 5
https://www.astrobin.com/294278/B/
Copyright: Steve Milne and Olly Penrice

[starsurfer]

Sh2-64
https://www.astrobin.com/265845/
Copyright: Alberto Pisabarro

[starsurfer]

M22, M8 and M20
http://astrofotografia.eu/m22-m20-i-m8/
Copyright: Dominik Wos

Click to view full size image

[bystander]

MeerKAT Reveals Clearest View Yet of Center of Milky Way
Square Kilometer Array - Africa | MeerKAT | 2018 Jul 13

This image, based on observations made with South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope, shows the clearest view yet of the central regions of our galaxy. At the distance of the galactic centre (located within the white area near image centre), this 2 degree by 1 degree panorama corresponds to an area of approximately 1,000 light-years by 500 light-years.

The colour scheme chosen here to display the signals represents the brightness of the radio waves recorded by the telescope (ranging from red for faint emission to orange to yellow to white for the brightest areas). This image shows a wealth of never before seen features, as well as a clearer view of previously known supernova remnants, star-forming regions, and radio filaments.

MeerKAT’s 64 dishes or antennas provide 2,000 unique antenna pairs, far more than any comparable telescope. This design feature contributes critically to making high-fidelity images of the radio sky, including this best view in existence of the centre of the Milky Way. It is also advantageous to observe the centre of the galaxy from South Africa, where it passes overhead and is visible for almost 12 hours each day, unlike from northern hemisphere locations.

Radio array telescopes do not measure the very largest, smooth structures in a given region of the sky. That additional information can be obtained using single dish radio telescopes; for the MeerKAT image shown here, that information is from the Green Bank Telescope (courtesy of Bill Cotton, NRAO).

[starsurfer]

NGC 2207
https://www.eso.org/public/images/ngc2207/
Copyright: ESO

Click to view full size image

[starsurfer]

NGC 3201
http://www.chart32.de/index.php/component/k2/item/263
Copyright: CHART32
Processing: Bernd Flach-Wilken

[Ann]

NGC 4725 and LoTr 5
https://www.astrobin.com/294278/B/
Copyright: Steve Milne and Olly Penrice
ngc4725.jpg

That's an incredibly strange planetary nebula. That blue cloud could be either a spherical reflection nebula or an OIII-emitting planetary nebula. We see no ionized hydrogen at all, which I would expect to be present if the central star is hot enough to ionize oxygen. And the central star looks all yellow! How utterly weird! Could there possibly be a tiny white dwarf in there which is hot enough to ionize oxygen but too small to show up next to its giant companion?

Ann

[starsurfer]

NGC 4725 and LoTr 5
https://www.astrobin.com/294278/B/
Copyright: Steve Milne and Olly Penrice
ngc4725.jpg

That's an incredibly strange planetary nebula. That blue cloud could be either a spherical reflection nebula or an OIII-emitting planetary nebula. We see no ionized hydrogen at all, which I would expect to be present if the central star is hot enough to ionize oxygen. And the central star looks all yellow! How utterly weird! Could there possibly be a tiny white dwarf in there which is hot enough to ionize oxygen but too small to show up next to its giant companion?

Ann

Well it's definitely an OIII emitting planetary nebula, which are actually more common than you think. Don't know about the central star but I'm pretty sure it is a binary.