Starship Asterisk*

Ann wrote:This is a very beautiful picture of a much-photographed object.

I checked out the imaging data of the picture and was a bit confused. As far as I could understand, today's APOD is not an RGB image, photographed through red, green and blue filters. It is also not an image which has been enhanced with extra Ha data. I would assume, therefore, that this is an image whose colors do not depend on filters. Clearly it is not a mapped color image, either. The colors in this image are unusually delicate.

Ann

APOD Robot wrote: Twisting near the center of the Lagoon, the small, bright hourglass shape is the turbulent result of extreme stellar winds and intense starlight.

APOD Robot wrote: The alluring color view was captured with a telescope and digital camera while M8 was high in dark, rural Argentina skies. At the nebula's estimated distance, the picture spans over 60 light-years.]

neufer wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]Image credit: J-P Metsavainio of Astro Anarchy:[/color] http://astroanarchy.blogspot.fi/[/b]

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neufer wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF]Image credit: J-P Metsavainio of Astro Anarchy:[/color] http://astroanarchy.blogspot.fi/[/b]

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Adolfo Domínguez wrote:It's really a interesting image what you've posted. But, what means this image slipping to right and left?

Galaxian wrote:

APOD Robot wrote: Twisting near the center of the Lagoon, the small, bright hourglass shape is the turbulent result of extreme stellar winds and intense starlight.

"Hourglass shape"? I can see a dark, demented, rabid meerkat off to the right and a dark sidewinder to left of centre but no hourglass. Is my pareidolonics broken again?

Galaxian wrote:

APOD Robot wrote: The alluring color view was captured with a telescope and digital camera while M8 was high in dark, rural Argentina skies. At the nebula's estimated distance, the picture spans over 60 light-years.]

It's a truly lovely image, very beautifully done, but at 60 LYs across I doubt if it would be visible to the human eye if we could even get closer [to do which, we need starships, of course]. Too vast, too faint, not enough colour photons per square radian. Does anyone know if I'm right in thinking that, like a thin mist on Earth, this is one of those things best seen from a vast distance and quite undetectable if you lived inside it?

Ann wrote:It's a truly lovely image, very beautifully done, but at 60 LYs across I doubt if it would be visible to the human eye if we could even get closer [to do which, we need starships, of course]. Too vast, too faint, not enough colour photons per square radian. Does anyone know if I'm right in thinking that, like a thin mist on Earth, this is one of those things best seen from a vast distance and quite undetectable if you lived inside it?

Chris Peterson wrote:

Adolfo Domínguez wrote:
It's really a interesting image what you've posted. But, what means this image slipping to right and left?

The image is a fantasy. It is misleading, and IMO doesn't belong in a science forum like this without a good deal of qualification. It was created by inventing a 3D structure that doesn't represent reality, and mapping an astroimage into it. The result gives a sense of what the 3D structure of a nebula might look like, but does not represent the physical reality of this particular nebula at all. We can't generate a true 3D image of a structure like this because we only observe it from a single viewpoint, and we have only limited and crude information about the distance to any part of it, or its surrounds.

• Actually, the CIA has just released this photo from Area 51.
  
  "That which we do not understand sometimes causes apprehension."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Fiction_Theatre wrote:
Science Fiction Theatre, December 31, 1955 : Are We Invaded?

<<"That which we do not understand sometimes causes apprehension." A reporter and the daughter of a respected astronomer, watching the stars one evening from their parked car, see what they consider a flying saucer. A stranger appears at the door of the car saying he too saw the light in the sky, and asks if he can be given a lift down the hill into town. Later, the astronomer refuses to believe the couple saw anything more than an optical illusion. To prove the existence of UFOs, the reporter films a documentary of witnesses, while the astronomer promptly demonstrates scientific explanations for each witness's sightings. But the mysterious stranger has dropped off a photograph at the astronomer's lab- a photograph of our solar system taken from deep space. The stranger has disappeared, but left a forwarding address: Alpha Centauri, 4.5 light years from Earth.>>

Billsey wrote:I regard it as unfortunate that this nebula already has a popular name, because in this image, to me, it looks for all the world like a tunnel rather than a lagoon.

Ann wrote: The Hourglass Nebula is the brightest part of the Lagoon Nebula. It shows up well in this Anglo-Australian Observatory photo. A Hubble picture of the Hourglass Nebula can be seen here.

Galaxian wrote:

APOD Robot wrote: The alluring color view was captured with a telescope and digital camera while M8 was high in dark, rural Argentina skies. At the nebula's estimated distance, the picture spans over 60 light-years.]

It's a truly lovely image, very beautifully done, but at 60 LYs across I doubt if it would be visible to the human eye if we could even get closer [to do which, we need starships, of course]. Too vast, too faint, not enough colour photons per square radian. Does anyone know if I'm right in thinking that, like a thin mist on Earth, this is one of those things best seen from a vast distance and quite undetectable if you lived inside it?

I'm sure you are right that we wouldn't see much (or any) of the nebulosity if we lived inside the Lagoon Nebula. Oh, correction: I think we might see parts of the Hourglass Nebula. Though perhaps we would have to look at it the same way as we look at the solar corona: by blotting out the brilliant disk of the star which is creating the nebula.

I think it would be quite unhealthy to live inside the Lagoon Nebula. All those hot stars ionizing the Nebula would produce would produce a lot of nasty radiation. And one of those stars could just pop one day as a supernova.

Ann

Galaxian wrote:I'm not so sure it would be unhealthy to live in the Lagoon, or even on Io or in the accretion disk of a magnetar. Like the life that got pushed into living near black smokers I suspect that anything that evolved there would think our calm, placid, weakly irradiated space is unsurvivable. Life adapts.

Galaxian wrote:
I'm not so sure it would be unhealthy to live in the Lagoon, or even on Io or in the accretion disk of a magnetar. Like the life that got pushed into living near black smokers I suspect that anything that evolved there would think our calm, placid, weakly irradiated space is unsurvivable. Life adapts.

Chris Peterson wrote:
Life adapts, but it takes time, and it probably requires that change doesn't happen too fast. I don't think the radiation environment in general would make a place like the Lagoon inhospitable to life. But the supernova problem that Ann refers to probably is a big problem. Having a number of stars quite close to each other is also a problem, because it's likely to make planetary systems unstable.

In an environment like the Lagoon, I can easily imagine life developing. But I don't think you'll have planetary systems stable enough, or a space environment stable enough, to allow the necessary time for it to evolve to anything very complex before it gets toasted or frozen.

DavidLeodis wrote:It is a very nice image. :)

As I like to know the date when an image was taken I found that in the information brought up through the "The alluring color view" link it stated 2013-07-05, which (based on dates with other images in the website) will be 2013 July 5. However, in the image's Exif information it stated the create date (which I assume is the date it was taken) was August 7 2013. I wonder therefore which is the correct date when it was taken :?:

Chris Peterson wrote:

DavidLeodis wrote:It is a very nice image.

As I like to know the date when an image was taken I found that in the information brought up through the "The alluring color view" link it stated 2013-07-05, which (based on dates with other images in the website) will be 2013 July 5. However, in the image's Exif information it stated the create date (which I assume is the date it was taken) was August 7 2013. I wonder therefore which is the correct date when it was taken

Given that this isn't a single image, but a stack made from raw images that don't even include EXIF data in the first place, I'd be inclined to use the information on the imager's website for the date, and assume whatever is in the EXIF of the released JPEG is related to the processing software, not the camera.