Today, January 3, 2011, is the 7th anniversary of the Spirit rover landing on Mars. In their tradition, Glen Nagle and Stu Atkinson from Unmanned Spaceflight have teamed up to create a poster and poem combo to celebrate. The poster includes scenes from both Spirit’s and Opportunity’s adventures – Glen and Stu challenge you to see how many places you can name. Click on the images or visit Glen’s Astro0 website for higher resolution versions that you can download to print a poster or use for wallpaper.
And happy anniversary to the Mars Exploration Rovers and their science and engineering teams!
Here are some of the best space and astronomy images from 2010. These are in no particular order or ranking, just our favorites from the year. If you think we’ve missed any, feel free to add or link to in the comment section. This top image, however, might be my personal favorite from 2010, an image of the space shuttle Endeavor backdropped by the breathtaking image of the earth’s atmosphere. This image was captured from the International Space Station the STS-130 mission on February 9, 2010.
This might win the prize for weirdest image of the year. This picture of Mars’ surface from the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been compared to a close-up of a man’s face (complete with whiskers) or pine trees growing on the Red Planet. Scientists say the dark streaks are actually trails of debris, created by landslides that occur when carbon dioxide ice melts away from sand dunes near Mars’ north pole.
A new type of adaptive optics for solar observations has produced some incredible results, providing the most detailed image of a sunspot ever obtained in visible light. A new telescope built by the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Big Bear Solar Observatory has seen its ‘first light’ using a deformable mirror, which is able to reduce atmospheric distortions. This is the first facility-class solar observatory built in more than a generation in the U.S.
This image was released in commemoration of the 20th Birthday of the Hubble Space Telescope. The amazing view of what has been nicknamed “Mystic Mountain,” is just a small portion of one of the largest known star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Three light-year-tall towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula. The scene is reminiscent of Hubble’s classic “Pillars of Creation” photo from 1995, but even more striking. “Mystic Mountain has clouds of gas and dust, that have not only baby stars, but also baby solar systems,” said John Grunsfeld, Hubble-hugger, repairman and now the Deputry Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute. “4.5 billion years ago, this may be what our solar system looked like.”
Here’s a look at the Moon in a way we’ve never quite seen it before: a close up, but wide angle view. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter camera actually consists of three cameras: there are two narrow-angle cameras which make high-resolution, black-and-white images of the surface, with resolutions down to 1 meter (about 3.3 feet). A third, a wide-angle camera (WAC), takes color and ultraviolet images over the complete lunar surface at 100-meter (almost 330-foot) resolution. However, the raw wide-angle images are somewhat distorted by the camera, but Maurice Collins, a Moon enthusiast from New Zealand, found that putting several images together in a mosaic removes a lot of the distortions and produces a much clearer image. The results are nothing short of stunning; this jaw-dropping image of the Marius Hills region of the Moon is one example. For more, see Maurice’s website, Moon Science .
The Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys has captured a remarkable image of a spiral in space earlier this year. No, not a spiral galaxy, (and not another Norway Spiral!) but the formation of an unusual pre-planetary nebula in one of the most perfect geometrical spirals ever seen. The nebula, called IRAS 23166+1655, is forming around the star LL Pegasi (also known as AFGL 3068) in the constellation of Pegasus.
More wide angle Moon (guess I can’t get enough from The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter….) This wide-angle mosaic of the South Pole shows Cabeus Crater, where LCROSS impacted in 2009, as well as the Aitken Basin, which contains impact melt that will allow scientists to unambiguously determine the basin’s age, plus Shackleton crater, the region touted as the perfect place for future outposts and huge telescopes. The permanently shadowed regions in this crater wonderland could harbor reservoirs of ice and other volatiles contain a “priceless record of water composition dating back to the beginning of our Solar System, an incomparable dataset for astrobiology investigations,” said Mark Robinson, principal investigator for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera. “Additionally, these volatile deposits could serve as a tremendously valuable resource for future explorers.”
The underside of the space shuttle Discovery is visible in this view from the International Space Station, captured after the shuttle undocked on April 17. The pretty feature on Earth below is the south end of Isla de Providencia, about 150 miles off the coast of Nicaragua.
Another favorite from the ISS and the Cupola.
This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows a ghostlike nebula known as IRAS 05437+2502. The nebula is a small star-forming region filled with dark dust that was first noted in images taken by the IRAS satellite in infrared light in 1983.
Here’s a personal favorite — the launch of Endeavour on February 8. Why a favorite? I was there to watch the launch live and in person, which left me speechless. A great shot by UT photographer Alan Walters.
Hubble took a look at a possible asteroid collision after it was originally seen by ground-based observatories
on January 6, 2010, spotted evidence of an asteroid collision in the asteroid belt, revealing a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust. With Hubble’s sharp vision, astronomers believe a head-on collision between two asteroids may have occurred. Astronomers have long thought the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.
It’s not like we’ve never seen the planetary nebula NGC 1514 before, but we’ve never seen it though WISE’s infrared eyes, until now. And in a stunning surprise, cylindrical rings appear to be encircling the dying star, like a neon-lit carousel, or perhaps like rolling tire surrounding a glowing blob. “I just happened to look up one of my favorite objects in our WISE catalogue and was shocked to see these odd rings,” said Michael Ressler, a member of the WISE science team at JPL. “This object has been studied for more than 200 years, but WISE shows us it still has surprises.
The Rosetta spacecraft flew by asteroid Lutetia, returning the first close up images of this battered, cratered body. Closest approach took place on July 10, at a distance of 3,162 km (1,964 miles). The images show that Lutetia has been on the receiving end of many impacts during its 4.5 billion years of existence. As Rosetta drew close, a giant bowl-shaped depression stretching across much of the asteroid rotated into view. The images confirm that Lutetia is an elongated body, with its longest side around 130 km (80 miles).
From our vantage point on Earth, it takes just a half second for the International Space Station to fly across the face of the Moon, so catching a transit is tricky. But award-winning French astrophotographer Theirry Legault captured an amazingly sharp and detailed transit image that makes the ISS look like it is sitting on the Moon’s surface! Legault took this image from Avranches (Normandy, France) a few hours before the eclipse, on December 20th at 21:34 UT. He used a Meade 10″ ACF on Takahashi EM400, with a Canon 5D mark II. The transit duration was just 0.55 seconds, as the ISS is traveling at 7.5km/s or 28,0000 km/h (17,500 mph). See below for a close-up crop of the image which shows the amount of detail visible of the space station.
What do you do if you’re watching the lunar eclipse but don’t have your camera? Make a sketch, just like the astronomers of old. Amateur astronomer Ted Judah from California enjoyed the eclipse, but since he was away on a trip with his family and “there was no room for my astrophotography equipment in the car,” he said, Ted resorted to drawing what he witnessed. Lovely.
Below is another artistic view of the eclipse, although taken by a camera.
Tavi Greiner took this image from her yard in Shallotte, North Carolina. Her description: “The darkened sky beneath Totality’s copper Moon reveals Orion to the left and Pleiades to the right.” See more of her images at “A Sky Full of Stars.”
For the first time in almost four centuries a total lunar eclipse coincided with the solstice – mid-winter for northern hemisphere skywatchers and mid-summer for the southern hemisphere. For those with a clear view of the sky (I was not that lucky!), the entire event was visible from North America, Greenland and Iceland, while western Europe saw the beginning stages before moonset and western Asia got the later stages after moonrise. Australia also saw the late stages of the eclipse.
People with clear skies in the northern hemisphere saw the Moon transformed into a “coppery orb,” as Tony Hoffman from Queens, New York called it (see his image below.) The Moon didn’t disappear completely, as the residual light from its surface is refracted by our atmosphere, resulting in the Moon turning a coppery, red or brown color. The eclipse lasted for about three and a half hours. See some images and videos from around the world, below. Clicking on each image will bring you to the original source.
Former space shuttle technician Jen Scheer (@flyingjenny on Twitter) got up earlier than usual (she takes a daily sunrise picture from around Kennedy Space Center each morning) to capture some great shots of the eclipse. You can see more of her images at her Flickr page.
Here’s a video taken from Savannah, Georgia in the US:
And another video from UT frequenter, Brent (aka Hellobozos) from Orlando Florida. He took 6 second avi’s every 5 minutes for 6 hours, from 12:30am to 6am EST:
And one more from Carl Hamilton from Bowie, Maryland:
This image was taken by photographer John O’Connor, who normally takes images of rockets and spacecraft (see his website NASATech, for amazing virtual tours of spacecraft, launchpads and more). He was up in the middle of the night to take images of space shuttle Discovery’s intended rollback from the launchpad to the Vehicle Assembly Building, but the rollback was delayed because of a technical problem.
“I intended to take a couple of quick shots of totality before heading out but ended up spending 45 minutes shooting the moon, as they say,” John wrote me. “This is my first attempt at astrophotography. I shot it with a 300 mm fixed focal length lens with a doubler on it. With the 1.5 multiplier factor on the 2/3 size sensor, it was about 900 mm focal length. It was 4 second shot at 100 ISO with an f4.5 aperture, as wide as the lens would let me go. Note the smudged stars. Even at a 4 second exposure the Earth’s rotation is evident, blurring, ever-so-slightly, the lunar disk.”
About a week ago, a bright white storm emerged on Saturn’s northern hemisphere, and amateur astronomer/planet astrophotographer extraordinaire Anthony Wesley from Australia has captured a few images of it. “This is the brightest Saturn storm in decades,” Anthony said on his website, Ice In Space. “If you get a chance to see it visually then take it, as it may be one of the rare “Great White Spot” (GWS) outbreaks on Saturn.”
Great White Spots, or Great White Ovals occur periodically on Saturn, and are usually large enough to be visible by telescope from Earth by their characteristic white appearance. The spots can be several thousands of kilometers wide.
Anthony joked that the outburst on Saturn might happening because the planet getting a little jealous that Jupiter has been getting lately with the reappearance of the Southern Equatorial Belt.
Is this galaxy exploding? Although that’s what it might look like, this is actually two gigantic galaxies crashing into each other. NGC 520 — also known as Arp 157 — is a mashup of two huge galaxies, now combining into one. We can’t really watch the process, as it happens extremely slowly — over millions of years, and the whole process started about 300 million years ago. Apr 157 is about 100,000 light-years across and is now in the middle stage of the merging process, as the two nuclei haven’t come together yet, but the two discs have. The merger features a tail of stars and a prominent dust lane. NGC 520 is one of the brightest interacting galaxies in the sky and lies in the direction of Pisces (the Fish), approximately 100 million light-years from Earth.
This image was taken by the ESO Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera attached to the 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla in Chile.
You’d need about a 4-inch telescope to see this 12th magnitude object yourself. Here’s the location: RA: 1h 24m 35.1s, Declination: +03° 47? 33?. Or put in those coordinates in Google Sky to see it there.
With the Sun’s activity increasing just a bit, sky watchers have witnessed an uptick in aurorae, especially northern observers. This top image is from an *extreme* northern observer, as in way up; about 320 km (220 miles) up above the Earth. Astronaut Doug Wheelock took this image from the International Space Station, and the beautiful sight made him wax poetic:
“Aurora Borealis as I will forever paint it in my dreams,” he wrote on Twitter. “Almost time to return home… no regrets… but mixed emotions. Leonardo da Vinci was right… ‘For once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the Earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been… and there you will long to return.'”
See other stunning recent aurora images from a more Earthly viewpoint:
Describing this picture, Salomonsen said on Flickr: “With a CME expected to hit earth on Nov.14th we could still see only a faint aurora. We got frustrated and then decided to drive back towards the city where it now was reported to clear up. After 5 minutes in the car suddenly we could see a strong aurora bursting out behind the partially cloudy sky.”
This is another gorgeous shot by Salomonsen, and on his Flickr site, he points out Ursa Major is visible in the top left, said it was just amazing how there were two rays of white and purple aurora, one moving faster than the other.
Photographer Sean Davies took this image on Nov. 13, 2010 near Dettah in the Northwest Territories, Canada, and said, “The aurora put on a great show just outside Yellowknife. The show lasted a good hour.” There’s another from Sean, below, on the same night. You can see more of Sean’s images at his Flickr site.
The photo below was taken on November 13, 2010 in Auster-Skaftafellssysla, Iceland by Skarphéðinn Þráinsson. See more of his images at Flickr.
This timelapse video was taken by Tor Even Mathisen, also from Tromsø, Norway.
It’s not like we’ve never seen the planetary nebula NGC 1514 before, but we’ve never seen it though WISE’s infrared eyes, until now. And in a stunning surprise, cylindrical rings appear to be encircling the dying star, like a neon-lit carousel, or perhaps like rolling tire surrounding a glowing blob. “I just happened to look up one of my favorite objects in our WISE catalogue and was shocked to see these odd rings,” said Michael Ressler, a member of the WISE science team at JPL. “This object has been studied for more than 200 years, but WISE shows us it still has surprises.
At first glance the rings look like the double-ringed space station in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Too bad the Bad Astronomer beat me to that likeness. He also compared it to a tuna can.)
Other people see different things in this image.
“I am reminded of the jellyfish exhibition at the Monterey Bay Aquarium — beautiful things floating in water, except this one is in space,” said Edward (Ned) Wright, the principal investigator of the WISE mission at UCLA, and a co-author of a paper on the findings, reported in the Astronomical Journal.
WISE was able to spot the rings for the first time because their dust is being heated and glows with the infrared light that WISE can detect. In visible-light images, the rings are hidden from view, overwhelmed by the brightly fluorescing clouds of gas.
Here’s what NGC 1514 looks like in visible light from a ground observatory:
The object is actually a pair of stars, seen as a single dot at the center of the blue orb. One star is a dying giant somewhat heavier and hotter than our sun, and the other was an even larger star that has now contracted into a dense body called a white dwarf. As the giant star ages, it sheds some its outer layers of material. An inner shell of ejected material is seen in bright, light blues. An outer shell can also be seen in more translucent shades of blue.
This planetary nebula is also called the “Crystal Ball” nebula, and Ressler said although NGC 1514’s structure looks unique, is probably similar in overall geometry to other hour-glass nebulae, such as the Engraved Hourglass Nebula.
The structure looks different in WISE’s view because the rings are detectable only by their heat; they do not fluoresce at visible wavelengths, as do the rings in the other objects.
The WISE science team says that more oddballs like NGC 1514 are sure to turn up in the plethora of WISE data — the first batch of which will be released to the astronomical community in spring 2011.
I know I always smile when I see the International Space Station in the night sky, but here the sky itself appears happy, with the ISS crossing the field of view of the Niton All-Sky camera. With a long exposure, a “star trail” forms as the space station moves across the sky. 🙂
The camera is located on the Isle of Wight and operated through the University of Hertfordshire. Check out the camera’s website — there a some great “unusual” images” which include meteors, atmospheric phenomena and even wildlife making an appearance.