Starship Asterisk*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_6357 wrote:Pismis 24
[NGC 6357] includes the open cluster Pismis 24, which is home to several massive stars. One of the brightest stars in the cluster, Pismis 24-1, was thought possibly to be the most massive on record, until it was discovered to be a binary system.[5]

Beyond wrote:Ahh, i spotted the cave easily in this one. It's illuminated by the massive star.

jmaiz wrote:Hi, I am the author of this image. Can you please correct my name? It is "J. Maíz Apellániz", not "J. M. Apellániz". Maíz is part of my family name, not my middle name, and should be spelled out completely. You can learn more about Spanish names at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_names][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_names]. Also, you can verify this information by going to my web site: [http://jmaiz.iaa.es][http://jmaiz.iaa.es]. Thank you.

bentsn wrote:It appears that the image is a composite. The diffraction spikes on the two lowest bright stars are rotated about 45 degrees from those in the rest of the image. In addition the bottom right corner of the image has very low resolution.

geckzilla wrote:

bentsn wrote:It appears that the image is a composite. The diffraction spikes on the two lowest bright stars are rotated about 45 degrees from those in the rest of the image. In addition the bottom right corner of the image has very low resolution.

Deep space photos invariably are. It's a long process.

geckzilla wrote:

jmaiz wrote:Hi, I am the author of this image. Can you please correct my name? It is "J. Maíz Apellániz", not "J. M. Apellániz". Maíz is part of my family name, not my middle name, and should be spelled out completely. You can learn more about Spanish names at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_names][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_names]. Also, you can verify this information by going to my web site: [http://jmaiz.iaa.es][http://jmaiz.iaa.es]. Thank you.

I sent an email to RJN about it.

jmaiz wrote:Hi, I am the author of this image. Can you please correct my name? It is "J. Maíz Apellániz", not "J. M. Apellániz".

APOD Robot wrote: A Massive Star in NGC 6357

Explanation: For reasons unknown, NGC 6357 is forming some of the most massive stars ever discovered.

Ann wrote:Of course I keep wondering about the colors. As can be seen from this larger photo of the same area, the star that is seen "inside the nebular cave", so that it should be more reddened than the other stars, is instead seen to be the bluest. Is that because of the filters used and how the filters were mapped? This page lists several filters used for this image, among them a 550 nm filter mapped as blue, and a 547 nm filter, very slightly bluer than the first one, which is mapped as green. Does this have anything to do with the confusing colors?

geckzilla wrote:I've found the spacetelescope.org pages to be a lot more informative than other outreach sites. Most of them don't even include filter information.

Southeast Asia wrote:My question for this APOD entry would be: exactly how, or even roughly how massive is this massive star in NGC 6357?

Compared to say, our Sun?

Thanks always for all the insight and reader education.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pismis_24-1 wrote:

When originally discovered and thought to be a single star, Pismis 24-1 was calculated to have a mass around 300 times the sun, but as currently known all three components have masses less than 100 times the sun.

Chris Peterson wrote:

geckzilla wrote:I've found the spacetelescope.org pages to be a lot more informative than other outreach sites. Most of them don't even include filter information.

IMO, a site that claims to be involved in scientific outreach, that doesn't, at a minimum, identify the actual filters used as well as the mappings between them and RGB, is an embarrassment. It just reflects the dumbing down of science in America today (although I've noticed that ESA sites are often particularly poor when it comes to providing the most basic of information needed to understand an image).

Often, these sites put up some sort of press-release quality text that isn't very informative and is only moderately accurate, as well. Seems to be more about PR than actual education.

geckzilla wrote:

Chris Peterson wrote:

geckzilla wrote:I've found the spacetelescope.org pages to be a lot more informative than other outreach sites. Most of them don't even include filter information.

IMO, a site that claims to be involved in scientific outreach, that doesn't, at a minimum, identify the actual filters used as well as the mappings between them and RGB, is an embarrassment. It just reflects the dumbing down of science in America today (although I've noticed that ESA sites are often particularly poor when it comes to providing the most basic of information needed to understand an image).

Often, these sites put up some sort of press-release quality text that isn't very informative and is only moderately accurate, as well. Seems to be more about PR than actual education.

The text is blue for the filter used in the blue channel, green for the next, and red for the other three. The only thing they didn't include were whether they were narrow, wide, medium, or whatever LP stands for (is that polarized?) longpass.

geckzilla wrote:Yeah, I think their strategy differs from yours a little. They want to draw people in with an amazing image and show the least confusing information possible so that the average Joe looking at the site comes away feeling that the continued funding of Hubble is a worthy cause. It's definitely more about being inspiring and rapid avulsion of socks through mere viewing of images. It's sort of funny that when viewing a Hubble image it's almost guaranteed that north isn't up because it almost always looks more presentable if the image is rotated so that the areas without data can be nicely cropped of. I get happy on the rare occasion I don't have to rotate them away from north up.