Found Images: 2020 February

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NGC 1964
https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1739a/
Copyright: ESO/Jean-Christophe Lambry

Click to view full size image

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BBW 56
http://www.astro-austral.cl/imagenes/ne ... 6/info.htm
Copyright: José Joaquin Pérez

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Colour in the Air
ESO Picture of the Week | 2020 Feb 17

Image Credit: Yuri Beletsky (LCO)/ESO

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Located deep in the Chilean Atacama Desert, far from the light pollution associated with human activity, is ESO’s Paranal Observatory: a world-leading research site that enjoys some of the darkest skies on Earth. Paradoxically, it is this extreme darkness that allows the sky to light up in technicolour in this image.

The striking radiant light visible in the sky here is a phenomenon called airglow, which lends a magical appearance to the already breathtaking night sky. As the name suggests, airglow is a faint glow in the air created as atoms and molecules in the atmosphere combine and emit radiation. It is only visible in regions where the sky is dark enough that artificial lights do not overwhelm it. This phenomenon was the subject of ESOcast 78.

This perspective was captured from the site of VISTA, the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy. The trail of faint yellow lights along the ground leads towards Cerro Paranal, the mountain in the centre of the image, where ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) is just about discernible at the top. The bright band of stars that forms our home galaxy, the Milky Way, appears to arc over the mountain, infused with the colours of the atmosphere.

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A Smudged Fingerprint
ESA Hubble Picture of the Week | 2020 Feb 17

Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

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TheNASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is no stranger to spiral galaxies. The telescope has brought us some of the most beautiful images ever taken of our spiral neighbours — and this Picture of the Week, which features a galaxy known as NGC 4689, is no exception.

However, seen almost face on, NGC 4689 appears less like a majestic spiral and more like a smudged fingerprint on the sky. No matter how good the image quality, there is little contrast between the spiralling arms of stars, gas, and dust, and the less dense areas in between. This is because NGC 4689 is something known as an “anaemic galaxy”, a galaxy that contains only quite small quantities of the raw materials needed to produce stars. This means that star formation is quelled in NGC 4689, and the pinwheeling, bustling arms are less bright than those belonging to other Hubble muses.

Despite this subtlety when compared to its brash, spotlight-stealing relatives, NGC 4689 retains an otherworldly charm, its delicately glowing material standing out subtly from the surrounding darkness of space.

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NGC 7354
http://www.capella-observatory.com/Imag ... GC7354.htm
Copyright: Makis Palaiologou, Stefan Binnewies and Josef Pöpsel

[Ann]

Perseus constellation
Tony and Daphne Hallas/ Science Photo Library

Click to view full size image

A fantastic picture of Perseus by Tony and Daphne Hallas.

Note the Pleiades at lower right (although the Pleiades is not in Perseus), the red California Nebula below center, the Double Cluster near top, the faint Heart and Soul nebulas to the left of the Double Cluster, the elongated Alpha Persei Moving Cluster near center, and variable star Algol (blue star) to the right of the Alpha Persei Moving Group.

What a splendid photo!

Ann

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Eagle Nebula (M16)
https://www.pbase.com/kwiechen/image/166402296/
Copyright: Kai Wiechen

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M7
http://feltotiphotography.blogspot.com/ ... ier-7.html
Copyright: Péter Feltóti

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B22 and IC 2087
https://delsaert.com/2018/12/02/barnard ... e-ic-2087/
Copyright: Bart Delsaert

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Sh2-140
https://www.astrobin.com/382930/
Copyright: Casey Good

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M5
http://www.chart32.de/index.php/component/k2/item/313
Copyright: CHART32
Processing: Johannes Schedler

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Golf Ball World
ESO Picture of the Week | 2020 Feb 24

Credit: ESO/M. Marsset et al/MISTRAL algorithm (ONERA/CNRS)

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A new study led by Pierre Vernazza (Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, France) conducted using ESO facilities has observed the asteroid Pallas for the first time at extremely high angular resolution. The asteroid could be successfully observed in such great detail thanks to the Adaptive-Optics (AO)-fed SPHERE imager on the Very Large Telescope (VLT).

German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthäus Olbers first discovered Pallas on 28 March 1802. Named for the Greek goddess Pallas Athene, the asteroid — along with many other asteroids discovered in the 19th century — was initially classified as a planet. As time passed and technology improved, Pallas was later reclassified as an asteroid. Today it is famous for being the third-largest asteroid in the Solar System, with an average diameter of 512 km.

Although Pallas is the largest known asteroid in the Solar System after Ceres and Vesta, it is the only one of these large asteroids that has not been visited by a spacecraft. This is due to its orbit, which has an unusually high inclination to the plane of the Earth’s orbit — which means it is particularly challenging to land a spacecraft on.

These new images show that the surface of Pallas displays very interesting topographic features suggesting a violent collisional history. Numerous large craters are found in both hemispheres of Pallas, forming a surface resembling a golf ball. The two distinct large impact basins on its surface could also be related to a family-forming impact — a collision which caused an original object to fracture into several separate bodies. The bright spot which appears in the southern hemisphere of Pallas (right image) is also very reminiscent of the salt deposits on Ceres. ...

The violent collisional history of aqueously evolved (2) Pallas ~ Michaël Marsset et al

• Nature Astronomy (online 10 Feb 2020) DOI: 10.1038/s41550-019-1007-5

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Centuries Before Hubble
ESA Hubble Picture of the Week | 2020 Feb 24

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al.

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This image of an archetypal spiral galaxy was captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

The subject of this image is known as NGC 691, and it can be found some 120 million light-years from Earth. This galaxy was one of thousands of objects discovered by astronomer William Herschel during his prolific decades-long career spent hunting for, characterising, and cataloguing a wide array of the galaxies and nebulae visible throughout the night sky — almost 200 years before Hubble was even launched.

The intricate detail visible in this Picture of the Week would likely be extraordinary to Herschel. Hubble was able to capture an impressive level of structure within NGC 691’s layers of stars and spiralling arms — all courtesy of the telescope’s high-resolution Wide Field Camera 3.

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NGC 300
https://www.glitteringlights.com/Images ... /i-szQww24
Copyright: Marco Lorenzi

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Mz 1
https://astrodonimaging.com/gallery/menzel-1/
Copyright: Don Goldman

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Playing Harps in the Radio Sky
AAS Featured Image | 2020 Feb 24

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Look closely at this radio image (click for the full view!) and you might see why scientists have named this phenomenon a radio “harp”. These remarkable near-parallel lines of emission — which are seemingly sorted by length, so that they resemble a harp with radio-emitting strings — span several light-years and can be spotted in the center regions of our galaxy. In a new study led by Timon Thomas (Leibniz-Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam), a team of scientists argues that this cosmic music is caused by a massive star or a pulsar (a magnetized neutron star) plunging through an ordered magnetic field in the galactic center. As the star crosses (moving upward, in the image above) bundles of field lines, it discharges high-energy cosmic rays that travel in either direction along the bundles, emitting radio waves. Thomas and collaborators use observations of these radio harps to study how cosmic rays propagate along magnetic fields.

Probing Cosmic Ray Transport with Radio Synchrotron Harps in the Galactic Center ~ Timon Thomas et al

• Astrophysical Journal Letters 890(2):L18 (2020 Feb 20) DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab7237
• arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1912.08491 > 18 Dec 2019

viewtopic.php?t=40117

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NGC 3344
http://www.spaceimages.de/astrofotos/galaxien/ngc-3344
Copyright: Jens Zippel

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NGC 5466
https://www.astrobin.com/339347/
Copyright: Matteo Quadri

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M53 and NGC 5053
https://www.astrobin.com/331145/B/
Copyright: Eric Coles and Mel Helm

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M4 and NGC 6144
http://ourcolorfulcosmos.com/mazlin/star-clusters/m4
Copyright: Steve Mazlin

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NGC 6712
http://www.capella-observatory.com/Imag ... GC6712.htm
Copyright: Josef Pöpsel, Stefan Binnewies and Johannes Schedler