Starship Asterisk*

Curious about what formations are shown close to (to the left and below) Mintaka. They appear as grayish fuzzy images. The one to the far left of Mintaka looks somewhat like a flying saucer (although I'm sure is not). Are these fuzzy gray images galaxies?

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090210.html

sbjross wrote:Curious about what formations are shown close to (to the left and below) Mintaka. They appear as grayish fuzzy images. The one to the far left of Mintaka looks somewhat like a flying saucer (although I'm sure is not). Are these fuzzy gray images galaxies?

They're dust globules.

The object above Alnilam, near the picture's edge, appears to be Klaatu's spaceship. Hope he looks like Michael Rennie and the Keanu Reeves zombie-robot, and that Gort is just 10 feet tall, not 100.

pacfandave wrote:The object above Alnilam, near the picture's edge, appears to be Klaatu's spaceship.
Hope he looks like Michael Rennie and the Keanu Reeves zombie-robot,
and that Gort is just 10 feet tall, not 100.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980604.html

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090210.html

Regular coloration on this photo and still comes out beautiful. 8)

Orin

orin stepanek wrote:Regular coloration on this photo and still comes out beautiful.

The aesthetics of the image are quite good, although I consider the claim that it "better matches human color perception than a more detailed composite taken over 15 years ago" to be weak. Perhaps the reference is to more accurate star colors; certainly, none of the extended objects in the image show any color to human vision except gray. There are other images of this region I prefer, but this image was made with a somewhat limited camera, so it isn't surprising there are some color issues.

I inspected my picture of unreal objects:
The light brownish small object left of mintaka is not real.
This "nebula" or "spacecraft" is caused by a small patch on my flatfield image.

Sorry...
Martin Mutti

http://www.robgendlerastropics.com/HH11Kpage.html

Robert Gendler took this colorful shot of the region. It captures only Alnitak of the Orion Belt Stars, but shows off the Horsehead and the Maple Leaf (Flame) nebulae as well. I bought this picture from Gendler maybe a year ago; it hangs on my bedroom wall.

Don't worry about it Martin. I saw that and immediately recognized it as what astrophoto processors fondly refer to as a "glitch". You can be forgiven as it's a very nice image. I know just what has gone into getting an image this deep.

By the way, re: the comment above about a galaxy... Contrary to the technical info brought to us by the Men In Black, there *IS* actually a galaxy visible on Orion's belt - or at least fairly close to it. It's tiny but visible in the larger image at about pixel location (463, 227).

-Noel

NoelC wrote:By the way, re: the comment above about a galaxy... Contrary to the technical info brought to us by the Men In Black, there *IS* actually a galaxy visible on Orion's belt - or at least fairly close to it. It's tiny but visible in the larger image at about pixel location (463, 227).

Noel, would you please look this way for a second: http://tinyurl.com/atjkjb