Starship Asterisk*

When I enlarge the APOD of May 28, 2008, ghostly images appear.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080528.html

Is this a Halloween/April Fool's type joke?

I understand the basic picture is a crop of the blown up photo.

But I count five apparitions, from the full screen one on the left to the little one on the right.

Just spooky.

Thanks for any info, Dave PDX

I'm not sure about 'Halloween/April Fool's Day', but that is an AWESOME image!!! 8)
I especially love how it looks enlarged!

(Keep up the great work, PTB! )

Some of the objects in the larger view don't seem to have been named. For example, east and a little south of Eta Carinae is a sharply defined spherical structure a couple or three light years across. Does anyone have any idea what it is? Something energetic must be inside but it's obscured by the shell of the object.

It's an amazing image, going light-years beyond what we're used to seeing in both resolution and scale. Hats off to the Hubble Heritage team! Preparation of this mosaic must truly have been a heroic undertaking in digital image processing.

One thing bothers me, though... It's quite obviously not a visual color image. I wish they would make it clear what the colors represent.

In the highest magnification image in various places I can see many tiny dark masses - bok globules? - silhouetted against the light background. I can only imagine that these are new solar systems forming... Fantastic stuff indeed.

Interstellar bubbles, shock fronts, stellar nurseries, glowing gas, dark silhouettes swirling on a cosmic scale... Awesome doesn't begin to cover this!

-Noel

NoelC wrote:One thing bothers me, though... It's quite obviously not a visual color image. I wish they would make it clear what the colors represent.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archiv ... 6/image/a/

Like sea serpents poking their heads out of a choppy sea.
Orin

The immense nebula is an estimated 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina the Keel (of the old southern constellation Argo Navis, the ship of Jason and the Argonauts, from Greek mythology).

This image is a mosaic of the Carina Nebula assembled from 48 frames taken with Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The Hubble images were taken in the light of neutral hydrogen. Color information was added with data taken at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Red corresponds to sulfur, green to hydrogen, and blue to oxygen emission.

Best Resolution ever:
http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2007 ... ll_jpg.jpg
200 megs+
29566 X 14321


I just pooped my pants. =/

My computer will crash if I try to load that...
but dang... can the resolution get any better? Oh wait... yes, it needs to, so we can zoom into each little black globule that is resting within this fantastic imagery.

FIX THE HUBBLE SO IT LASTS A HUNDRED YEARS... or so. A gift to our grandchildren's grandchildren, so they can laugh at what our primitive technology was compared to what theirs will be.

=b

what an incredible picture! it takes your breath away, and to be able to use one of my direction arrows on my keyboard after enlarging the picture to its max and move slowly through 300 light years of the image with so much going on in it is just awsome. wow...

Hello All,

Never in my wildest drea..........well...maybe in my wildest, did I expect such resolution and clarity of the edges of the molecular cloud areas even when zooming in at maximum. Techies rule!!!

I enjoy the race between the two octopusdogs .. and the big splash. Yeah man .. life is everywhere.

Try these images:

http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl ... dante+hell

Dave PDX wrote:But I count five apparitions, from the full screen one on the left to the little one on the right. Just spooky.

PHANTASMAGORIA (1869) by Lewis Carroll
CANTO I The Trystyng -

"A Spectre has first choice, by right,
In filling up a vacancy;
Then Phantom, Goblin, Elf, and Sprite-
If all these fail them, they invite
The nicest Ghoul that they can see. -

Not bad for amateurs, Apodman, but for real visions of hell check out Gustave Dore`s bible. Sorry, but I can't provide a url.

Doré's English Bible (1866) was a great success, and in 1867 Doré had a major exhibition of his work in London.

Like this one?

http://www.creationism.org/images/DoreB ... RedSea.jpg

Here's a creepy image.
It's the galaxy-eating hand!!


http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070806.html

Some interesting comments to ponder:

In the APOD text: "these clouds are typically much less dense than Earth's atmosphere"... Does this imply that some are as dense or even more dense than Earth's atmosphere? Imagine cosmic birds/animals flying/swimming through a molecular cloud dense enough to support life as we know it.

From the HubbleSite "ABOUT THIS IMAGE:" text: "The fireworks in the Carina region started three million years ago"... So if the Universe is 13+ billion years old, what caused this massive cloud of gas and dust to coalesce and form stars just cosmic moments ago? Did a satellite galaxy pass close by? Was it an energetic outburst from Eta Carinae?

Lastly, what's the latest word on servicing the now broken Advanced Camera for Surveys? Is there any hope for the Hubble to continue past the Shuttle era?

-Noel

NoelC wrote:In the APOD text: "these clouds are typically much less dense than Earth's atmosphere"... Does this imply that some are as dense or even more dense than Earth's atmosphere? Imagine cosmic birds/animals flying/swimming through a molecular cloud dense enough to support life as we know it.

If this is the "birthplace of stars" then at some point at least some part of it has to become a lot more dense than earth's atmosphere, don't you think?

NoelC wrote:Lastly, what's the latest word on servicing the now broken Advanced Camera for Surveys? Is there any hope for the Hubble to continue past the Shuttle era?

See: HubbleSite - Servicing Mission 4
and: NASA - Hubble Space Telescope Servicing Mission 4 Summary

HST SM4 should extend Hubble's life past 2013. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is scheduled for launch in 2013.

I guess I made an arbitrary mental distinction between "dust" and "molecular clouds" and was thinking of the latter pulling itself in to such a density as to be able to support life, but somehow without squeezing down to form a star or planetary system - at some point becoming a vast floating atmosphere rich with hydrogen, oxygen, water... Of course it's clear that a significant enough mass of the stuff will eventually coalesce and squeeze down to form a star.

I wonder if the actual moment of star formation, when the nuclear furnace first starts up is an extinction event... Could there be beings surfing the Herbig Haro shock fronts?

-Noel

NoelC wrote:I guess I made an arbitrary mental distinction between "dust" and "molecular clouds" and was thinking of the latter pulling itself in to such a density as to be able to support life, but somehow without squeezing down to form a star or planetary system - at some point becoming a vast floating atmosphere rich with hydrogen, oxygen, water... Of course it's clear that a significant enough mass of the stuff will eventually coalesce and squeeze down to form a star.

I wonder if the actual moment of star formation, when the nuclear furnace first starts up is an extinction event... Could there be beings surfing the Herbig Haro shock fronts?

-Noel

Have you read Larry Niven's The Integral Trees?

Apodman .. wow .. yeah like that one .. and like his drawing of Noah's boat drifting away from the people on the mountaintops. And what is to come upon our planet shortly. I'm glad to see this new JesusFreak guy on the forum .. miracles of the Last Days, etc.

Noel C has visions.

Hello JesusFreak16,

Welcome to the Forum. I appreciated your response to the posted reply to your question regarding the Square Nebula. Keep up the good work.

P.S. Do you know who Sophia is?

"I wonder if the actual moment of star formation, when the nuclear furnace first starts up is an extinction event... Could there be beings surfing the Herbig Haro shock fronts? "

Uhh. I think that when the density of the cloud is the same of the earth atmosphere or denser, then the gravity collaps all of it in a matter of a few thousand years or less into the creation of a new star. So in that short time, no life will have appear to witness the creation of a new star and it own end. I might be wrong tho. But i doubt it. Who knows?

Art, neufer;

Great identifying of the areas in the photo and the two scales at top right !! Thanks very much for these. I wasn't certain where eta Carinae was, nor of the size scale, I appreciate your efforts very much !

In a circle 3-5 light years surrounding eta Carinae there looks to be a huge magnetic field creating a similarly shaped structure to the Galactic Center Radio Arc at the center of our galaxy. I suspect they are the same dynamic of conception; electric currents in plasma which cause a magnetic field, the magnetic fields then focus the plasma into Birkeland strands, the magnetic focusing of the plasma makes a more efficient path for the current to flow, which then makes the magnetic fields stronger. This is a dynamic system and it is still evolving, and at a 6 x 10 light years size it's rather big !!!

Perhaps this is what Rickie Lee Jones meant by her album title 'Ghosty Head'.

Duom's quote - "Uhh. I think that when the density of the cloud is the same of the earth atmosphere or denser"

Duom .. Life is so variable in form and environment even here on earth that life in space will have evolved in totally unimaginable environments, pressures, temperatures, etc.

jesusfreak16 wrote:Here's a creepy image.
It's the galaxy-eating hand!!


http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap070806.html

Would the real Galactus please stand up, please stand up... =b