Found Images: 2021 August

[bystander]

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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 500K.

Thank you!

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[the_astronomy_enthusiast]

Carina Nebula 4 Panel mosiac, processed entirely in pixinsight. Data from Hubble Legacy Archive
HH 901/902 in the Carina Nebula by William Ostling, on Flickr

[bystander]

Planet La Silla and the Milky Way
ESO Picture of the Week | 2021 Aug 02

Image Credit: ESO/Petr Horálek

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It looks like a tiny planet but this Picture of the Week actually captures ESO’s La Silla Observatory using a photography technique called stereographic projection, whereby a flat image is projected onto a sphere.

La Silla, home to several of the instruments in the ESO family, was inaugurated in 1969. As well as being the first ESO observatory, it has also been at the forefront of many scientific and technological firsts. ESO’s pioneering 3.58-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT) was the first in the world to have a computer-controlled, or “active”, main mirror, leading the way for ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), where all four 8-meter mirrors are active.The High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) instrument attached to the ESO 3.6-metre telescope (36) is a hugely successful exoplanet hunter, discovering among other things the first ‘Earth-like’ planet in a star’s habitable zone.

Above “Planet La Silla” arches the pearlescent arm of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. It is the arid conditions of the Atacama Desert in Chile that allow such a view, as La Silla experiences over 300 cloudless nights per year.

[bystander]

Portrait of a Swirling Galaxy
ESA Hubble Picture of the Week | 2021 Aug 02

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team

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The spiral galaxy IC 1954 takes centre stage in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The galaxy, which lies approximately 45 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Horologium (The Clock), boasts a bright central bar and lazily winding spiral arms threaded with dark clouds of dust.

This portrait of IC 1954 was captured with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), and is one of a set of observations designed to take advantage of some telescope teamwork. Hubble observed groups of young stars in nearby galaxies at ultraviolet and optical wavelengths while the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) — a ground-based radio telescope — gathered data on star-forming discs and clouds of cold gas. Combining the two sets of observations allowed astronomers to join the dots and understand the connections between young stars and the clouds of cold gas which give rise to them.

These observations also lay the groundwork for future observations with the upcoming NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which will peer into nearby galaxies and observe the earliest phases of star formation.

[starsurfer]

Pacman Nebula (NGC 281)
https://astrodonimaging.com/gallery/pac ... arrowband/
Copyright: Don Goldman

[starsurfer]

PaRasMoMi 1
https://www.astrobin.com/qr6j4c/C/
Copyright: Patrick Dufour

You can read more about this discovery here.

[starsurfer]

NGC 5291
https://www.hansonastronomy.com/ngc-51
Data: Martin Pugh
Processing: Mark Hanson

[starsurfer]

NGC 1097
http://www.cielaustral.com/galerie/photo128.htm
Copyright: Ciel Austral

[starsurfer]

47 Tucanae (NGC 104)
https://www.rolfolsenastrophotography.c ... /i-ZDMHPxK
Copyright: Rolf Olsen

[starsurfer]

Trifid Nebula (M20)
https://www.pbase.com/gbachmayer/image/164111950/
Copyright: Gerhard Bachmayer

[starsurfer]

Sh2-42
https://noirlab.edu/public/images/iotw2121a/
Copyright: CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA
Processing: T. A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)

[starsurfer]

Shapley 1
http://www.chart32.de/index.php/component/k2/item/55
Copyright: CHART32
Processing: Konstantin Buchhold

[starsurfer]

K1-16
https://www.astrobin.com/kwcxem/
Copyright: Boris Chausov

[bystander]

A Celestial Arch Illuminates the Desert
ESO Picture of the Week | 2021 Aug 09

Image Credit: ESO/Mahdi Zamani

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The stunning arch of the Milky Way stretches across the Chilean night sky, accompanied by the Magellanic Clouds on the left and admired from the control building of ESO’s Paranal Observatory, home to the Very Large Telescope (VLT).

The Milky Way is between 100 000 and 200 000 light-years in diameter and is made up of billions of other stars besides our Sun. The galactic centre, seen here as the bright area to the top-left of the Milky Way arc, is 27 000 light-years away. It takes the Sun almost 250 million years to complete an orbit around the Milky Way centre, and it has done so approximately 20 times since it formed.

The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are just two of the Milky Way’s galactic neighbours. They orbit our Galaxy at a distance of about 160 000 and 200 000 light years, respectively. These dwarf galaxies have an irregular shape, possibly due to gravitational interactions between each other and with our Galaxy.

If the telescopes can be regarded as the eyes of the Paranal Observatory, the control building would be its brain. Along with various offices, it hosts the control room, from which all telescopes and instruments are controlled and pointed towards the cosmic objects to be observed, and where a first evaluation of the collected data is performed.

[bystander]

Seeing Quintuple
ESA Hubble Picture of the Week | 2021 Aug 09

Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, T. Treu

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Clustered at the centre of this image are six luminous spots of light, four of them forming a circle around a central pair. Appearances can be deceiving, however, as this formation is not composed of six individual galaxies, but only three: to be precise, a pair of galaxies and one distant quasar. Hubble data also indicates that there is a seventh spot of light in the very center, which is a rare fifth image of the distant quasar. This rare phenomenon is caused by the presence of two galaxies in the foreground that act as a lens.

These galaxies were imaged in spectacular detail by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which was installed on Hubble in 2009 during Hubble Servicing Mission 4, Hubble’s final servicing mission. The WFC3 was intended to operate until 2014, but 12 years after it was installed it continues to provide both top-quality data and fantastic images, such as this one.

The central pair of galaxies in this image are genuinely two separate galaxies. The four bright points circling them, and the fainter one in the very center, are actually five separate images of a single quasar (known as 2M1310-1714), an extremely luminous but distant object. The reason behind this “seeing quintuple” effect is a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when a celestial object with an enormous amount of mass — such as a pair of galaxies — causes the fabric of space to warp such that the light travelling through that space from a distant object is bent and magnified sufficiently that humans here on Earth can observe multiple magnified images of the far-away source. The quasar in this image actually lies further away from Earth than the pair of galaxies. The light from the quasar has been bent around the galaxy pair because of their enormous mass, giving the incredible appearance that the galaxy pair are surrounded by four quasars — whereas in reality, a single quasar lies far beyond them!

[Ann]

Seeing Quintuple
ESA Hubble Picture of the Week | 2021 Aug 09

Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, T. Treu

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Clustered at the centre of this image are six luminous spots of light, four of them forming a circle around a central pair. Appearances can be deceiving, however, as this formation is not composed of six individual galaxies, but only three: to be precise, a pair of galaxies and one distant quasar. Hubble data also indicates that there is a seventh spot of light in the very center, which is a rare fifth image of the distant quasar. This rare phenomenon is caused by the presence of two galaxies in the foreground that act as a lens.

These galaxies were imaged in spectacular detail by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which was installed on Hubble in 2009 during Hubble Servicing Mission 4, Hubble’s final servicing mission. The WFC3 was intended to operate until 2014, but 12 years after it was installed it continues to provide both top-quality data and fantastic images, such as this one.

The central pair of galaxies in this image are genuinely two separate galaxies. The four bright points circling them, and the fainter one in the very center, are actually five separate images of a single quasar (known as 2M1310-1714), an extremely luminous but distant object. The reason behind this “seeing quintuple” effect is a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs when a celestial object with an enormous amount of mass — such as a pair of galaxies — causes the fabric of space to warp such that the light travelling through that space from a distant object is bent and magnified sufficiently that humans here on Earth can observe multiple magnified images of the far-away source. The quasar in this image actually lies further away from Earth than the pair of galaxies. The light from the quasar has been bent around the galaxy pair because of their enormous mass, giving the incredible appearance that the galaxy pair are surrounded by four quasars — whereas in reality, a single quasar lies far beyond them!

It's so good to see Hubble up and running again!

I guess that what we are seeing, in the picture of a quasar appearing four times on the outskirts of the combined mass of two squashed-together elliptical galaxies (and once in the center between them) and the four outer ones seemingly being connected by some sort of "string", is either an Einstein cross or an Einstein ring, or something in between.

It's spectacular. We may note that the quasar is bluer in color than the elliptical galaxies, as a quasar is emitting extremely energetic shortwave light, which is going to be bluer than the light of the yellow elliptical galaxies, in spite of the (much) greater redshift of the quasar than of the galaxies.

I can't help comparing this image with the fantastic Refsdal supernova.

A multiply lensed quasar. Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, T. Treu

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Refsdal supernova. The image to the left shows a part of the deep field observation of the galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+2223 from the Frontier Fields programme. The circle indicates the predicted position of the newest appearance of the supernova. To the lower right the Einstein cross event from late 2014 is visible. The image on the top right shows observations by Hubble from October 2015, taken at the beginning of the observation programme to detect the newest appearance of the supernova. The image on the lower right shows the discovery of the Refsdal Supernova on 11 December 2015, as predicted by several different models. NASA & ESA and P. Kelly (University of California, Berkeley)

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Note that while the quasar appearing four times on the outskirts of two elliptical galaxies is bluer than the galaxies that are lensing it, supernova Refsdal is yellower than the elliptical galaxy that it is seemingly wrapped around, appearing as four yellow dots.

The yellow color of supernova Refsdal suggests to me that it is a core-collapse supernova, which are often yellow in color. Supernova type Ia, by contrast, are often blue. Admittedly the color of SN type Ia is usually not visually bluer than B-V =-0.01 or -0.02, so a SN typer Ia may certainly be redshift-reddened to a yellow color. Of course, it really hinges on how much ultraviolet light an SN type Ia will generate.

Ann

[starsurfer]

Patchick 5
http://www.starscapeimaging.com/Patchic ... hick5.html
Copyright: Jon Talbot

[starsurfer]

Medusa Nebula (Abell 21)
https://www.astrobin.com/s13jqq/
Copyright: Alberto Pisabarro

Looking at this will not turn you to stone.

[starsurfer]

vdB152 region
https://www.astrobin.com/376727/
Copyright: Chuck Manges

[starsurfer]

NGC 1788 and LDN 1616
https://delsaert.com/2020/10/27/ngc-178 ... -in-orion/
Copyright: Bart Delsaert

[barretosmed]

MESSIER M25 – OPEN CLUSTER IN THE CONSTELLATION OF SAGITTARIUS

M25, also designated IC4725, was discovered by Philippe Loys de Chéseaux in 1745 and cataloged by Charles Messier in 1764.
It has an apparent magnitude of 4.6, is an object little photographed, being observed with the naked eye, in areas of low light pollution, as a faint diffuse spot in the sky.
Messier 25 does not have an NGC number because, for an unknown reason, John Herschel did not include it in his General Catalog.
Astronomer John Louis Emil Dreyer added M25 to the second Index Catalog in 1908.

Best details (takes a while to open because the image is gigantic):
https://www.astrobin.com/full/4s7zc7/0/

EQUIPMENT:
ZWO ASI 6200MC PRO COLED
Espirit 150mm
83x 100sec
Date: 07/10/2021
Location: Jales-SP-Brazil

Name: Fernando Oliveira de Menezes
E-mail: Barretosmed@hotmail.com

Click to view full size image

[starsurfer]

Abell 31
https://www.chart32.de/index.php/component/k2/item/304
Copyright: CHART32
Processing: Johannes Schedler

Click to view full size image

[starsurfer]

LoTr 5
http://www.astrophoton.com/PN_LoTr_5-2.htm
Copyright: Bernhard Hubl

Click to view full size image

[bystander]

A Rift in the Sky
ESO Picture of the Week | 2021 Aug 16

Image Credit: ESO/ M. Zamani

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Dark lines criss-cross the Chilean sky at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, making the brightest region of the Milky Way play hide-and-seek with ESO’s VISTA telescope.

These lines, known as the Great Rift, are immense clouds of gas and dust located between the Solar System and the internal regions of the Milky Way. These clouds absorb most of the visible light trying to reach us from the billions of stars in the centre of our galaxy. Nonetheless, astronomers are still able to probe the inner Milky Way by observing infrared and radio light, which passes through the clouds without being absorbed, allowing us to literally “look through” the great rift.

Part of ESO’s Paranal Observatory, the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) is located on the peak next door to the one where the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) is perched. It is one of the largest telescopes for stellar surveys in the infrared, helping astronomers map the Universe and shed light on many cosmic mysteries such as the evolution of galaxies.

[bystander]

In the Heart of the Furnace
ESO Hubble Picture of the Week | 2021 Aug 16

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee, PHANGS-HST

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This jewel-bright image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 1385, a spiral galaxy 68 million light-years away from Earth, which lies in the constellation Fornax. The image was taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), which is often referred to as Hubble’s workhorse camera, thanks to its reliability and versatility. It was installed in 2009 when astronauts last visited Hubble, and 12 years later it remains remarkably productive.

NGC 1385’s home — the Fornax constellation — is not named after an animal or an ancient God, as are many of the other constellations. Fornax is simply the Latin word for a furnace. The constellation was named Fornax by Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, a French astronomer who was born in 1713. Lacaiile named 14 of the 88 constellations that are still recognised today. He seems to have had a penchant for naming constellations after scientific instruments, including Antlia (the air pump), Norma (the ruler, or set square) and Telescopium (the telescope).