Space and astronomy news
David McCormack took this picture of Venus, Mercury and Saturn during their recent conjunction from Sunbury, Australia.
Do you have photos you’d like to share? Post them to the Universe Today astrophotography forum or email them to me directly, and I might feature one in Universe Today.
When NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990, astronomers anticipated great discoveries, ranging from finding black holes to looking back billions of years toward the beginning of time. Now, 15 years later, the versatile telescope continues to deliver exciting new science, including helping to prove the existence of dark energy, tracing enigmatic gamma-ray bursts to distant galaxies, and sampling the atmospheres of far-flung planets. To celebrate Hubble’s 15th anniversary, new breathtaking images will be released of a majestic spiral galaxy teeming with newborn stars and an eerie-looking spire of gas and dust.
The new image of the well-known spiral galaxy M51 (known as the Whirlpool Galaxy), showcases a spiral galaxy’s classic features, from its curving arms, where newborn stars reside, to its yellowish central core, a home for older stars. A feature of considerable added interest is the companion galaxy located at the end of one of the spiral arms. The new photograph of the Eagle Nebula shows a tall, dense tower of gas that is being sculpted by ultraviolet light from a group of massive, hot stars.
The pictures are among the largest and sharpest views taken by Hubble. The images, taken by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, are 20 times larger than a photograph taken by a typical digital camera. The new images are so sharp that they could be enlarged to billboard size and still retain the stunning details.
Mural-sized images of both celestial objects will be unveiled at 100 museums, planetariums, and science centers across the country, from Guam to Maine. The 4-foot-by-6-foot image of M51 and the 3-foot-by-6-foot photograph of the Eagle Nebula will be on display at all the sites. A list of these sites is available on http://hubblesite.org/about_us/unveiling.shtml.
If you cannot see the pictures at a museum or planetarium, catch them on the new “Gallery” at http://hubblesite.org/gallery. Views of M51 and the Eagle Nebula, along with more than 1,000 other glorious Hubble images, can be savored from the comfort of your home. If you want some Hubble pictures to hang in your home, then go to “Astronomy Print Shop.” Choose from a list of Hubble images that are specially formatted for printing. Select the image, the size you want (from 4 inches by 6 inches to 16 inches by 20 inches), and download it. Then take it to your favorite print shop to make a copy suitable for framing.
Looking for information about Hubble and its discoveries that is written for children? Then go to the Amazing Space education website at http://amazing-space.stsci.edu. Children can read a story tailored just for them on Hubble’s 15th anniversary, entitled “Hubble’s Picture Book of the Universe.” The story is under “The Star Witness,” a section of the website offering Hubble news written for children. Children also can take a journey through the eras of telescope history by going to Amazing Space’s “Online Explorations” and clicking on “Telescopes from the Ground Up.” This newest addition to Amazing Space traces the fascinating history of telescope evolution from the technological advancements to the people who made the telescopes.
Hubble was placed into Earth-orbit on April 25, 1990. For the first time, a large telescope that sees in visible light began orbiting above Earth’s distorting atmosphere, which blurs starlight and makes images appear fuzzy. Astronomers anticipated great discoveries from Hubble. The telescope has delivered as promised and continues serving up new discoveries. During its 15 years of viewing the universe, the telescope has taken more than 700,000 snapshots of celestial objects such as galaxies, dying stars, and giant gas clouds, the birthplace of stars. Astronomers are looking forward to more great discoveries by Hubble.
Original Source: Hubble News Release
Amateur photographer Bojan Stajcar took this picture of the lunar occulation of Jupiter on the 27th of February. This picture was taken 10 minutes after the Moon partially occulted Jupiter, at 11:04 pm local time, from Melbourne, Australia. The camera used was a mechanically modified Connectix Quickcam, with 320×240 pixel CCD sensor in the focus of the motorized (“Bartelized”) homemade 10″, f5.6 reflector. Note the difference in the surfaces brightness of the Moon and Jupiter. Despite the fact that the moon surface consists of very low reflective material (dominantly basalt), it is brighter, as Jupiter is 5 times further away from the Sun.
If you’re an amateur astrophotographer, visit the Universe Today forum and post your pictures, we might feature it in the newsletter.
While cruising around Saturn in early October, Cassini captured a series of images that have been composed into the largest, most detailed, global natural color view of Saturn and its rings ever made.
This grand mosaic consists of 126 images acquired in a tile-like fashion, covering one end of Saturn’s rings to the other and the entire planet in between. The images were taken over the course of 2 hours on October 6, 2004, while Cassini was approximately 6.3 million kilometers (3.9 million miles) from Saturn. Since the view seen by Cassini during this time changed very little, no re-projection or alteration of any of the images was necessary.
Three images (red, green and blue) were taken at each of 42 locations, or ?footprints?, across the planet. The full color footprints were mosaicked together to produce a final product that is 8,888 pixels across and 4,544 pixels tall.
The smallest features seen here are 38 kilometers (24 miles) across. Many of Saturn’s splendid features noted previously in single frames taken by Cassini are visible in this one detailed, all-encompassing view: Subtle color variations across the rings, the thread-like F ring, ring shadows cast against the blue northern hemisphere, the planet?s shadow making its way across the rings to the left, blue-grey storms in Saturn’s southern hemisphere to the right and tiny Mimas and even smaller Janus (both faintly visible at lower left).
The Sun-Saturn-Cassini, or phase, angle at the time was 72 degrees; hence, the partial illumination of Saturn in this portrait. Later in the mission, when the spacecraft?s trajectory takes it far from Saturn and also into the direction of the Sun, Cassini will be able to look back and view Saturn and its rings in a more fully-illuminated geometry.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org.
Original Source: NASA/JPL/SSI News Release
Amateur photographer Paul F. Campbell took this picture of Jupiter from just outside his home in Washington, PA. Paul used a Meade ETX autostar in polar mode only, which has been supercharged by Dr. Clay Sherrod. The camera that I use is a Sac 7 CCD run by Astrovideo. The photo started out as a 1 minute video, with frames taken at 1/50 second. Paul then processed the video in registax 3 and then cleaned up the final photo in Adobe Photoshop. If you’re an amateur astrophotographer, visit the Universe Today forum and post your pictures, we might feature it in the newsletter.
Amateur photographer John Chumack took this picture of Spiral Galaxy NGC-253, which is located in the constellation of Sculptor. The telescope was a Takahashi Epsilon 250mm and ST8XE CCD camera, on a Software Bisque Paramount ME, taken on Mount Joy, New Mexico, New Mexico Skies Resort. John operated the telescope remotely from Dayton, Ohio using Arnie Rosner’s Rent-A-Scope setup. John has been imaging the sky for 2 decades, and has an amazing collection of pictures at his website: Galactic Images. If you’re an amateur astrophotographer, visit the Universe Today forum and post your pictures, we might feature it in the newsletter.
The Hubble Space Telescope’s latest image of the star V838 Monocerotis (V838 Mon) reveals dramatic changes in the illumination of surrounding dusty cloud structures. The effect, called a light echo, has been unveiling never-before-seen dust patterns ever since the star suddenly brightened for several weeks in early 2002.
The illumination of interstellar dust comes from the red supergiant star at the middle of the image, which gave off a pulse of light three years ago, somewhat similar to setting off a flashbulb in a darkened room. The dust surrounding V838 Mon may have been ejected from the star during a previous explosion, similar to the 2002 event.
The echoing of light through space is similar to the echoing of sound through air. As light from the stellar explosion continues to propagate outwards, different parts of the surrounding dust are illuminated, just as a sound echo bounces off of objects near the source, and later, objects further from the source. Eventually, when light from the back side of the nebula begins to arrive, the light echo will give the illusion of contracting, and finally it will disappear.
V838 Mon is located about 20,000 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Monoceros, placing the star at the outer edge of our Milky Way galaxy. The Hubble telescope has imaged V838 Mon and its light echo several times since the star’s outburst. Each time Hubble observes the event, different thin sections of the dust are seen as the pulse of illumination continues to expand away from the star at the speed of light, producing a constantly changing appearance. During the outburst event whose light reached Earth in 2002, the normally faint star suddenly brightened, becoming 600,000 times more luminous than our Sun.
The new image of V838 Mon, taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, was prepared from images obtained through filters that isolate blue, green, and infrared light. These images have been combined to produce a full-color picture that approximates the true colors of the light echo and the very red star near the center.
Original Source: Hubble News Release
One of the largest Hubble Space Telescope images ever made of a complete galaxy is being unveiled today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in San Diego, Calif.
The Hubble telescope captured a display of starlight, glowing gas, and silhouetted dark clouds of interstellar dust in this 4-foot-by-8-foot image of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1300. NGC 1300 is considered to be prototypical of barred spiral galaxies. Barred spirals differ from normal spiral galaxies in that the arms of the galaxy do not spiral all the way into the center, but are connected to the two ends of a straight bar of stars containing the nucleus at its center.
At Hubble’s resolution, a myriad of fine details, some of which have never before been seen, is seen throughout the galaxy’s arms, disk, bulge, and nucleus. Blue and red supergiant stars, star clusters, and star-forming regions are well resolved across the spiral arms, and dust lanes trace out fine structures in the disk and bar. Numerous more distant galaxies are visible in the background, and are seen even through the densest regions of NGC 1300.
In the core of the larger spiral structure of NGC 1300, the nucleus shows its own extraordinary and distinct “grand-design” spiral structure that is about 3,300 light-years (1 kiloparsec) long. Only galaxies with large-scale bars appear to have these grand-design inner disks ? a spiral within a spiral. Models suggest that the gas in a bar can be funneled inwards, and then spiral into the center through the grand-design disk, where it can potentially fuel a central black hole. NGC 1300 is not known to have an active nucleus, however, indicating either that there is no black hole, or that it is not accreting matter.
The image was constructed from exposures taken in September 2004 by the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard Hubble in four filters. Starlight and dust are seen in blue, visible, and infrared light. Bright star clusters are highlighted in red by their associated emission from glowing hydrogen gas. Due to the galaxy’s large size, two adjacent pointings of the telescope were necessary to cover the extent of the spiral arms. The galaxy lies roughly 69 million light-years away (21 megaparsecs) in the direction of the constellation Eridanus.
Original Source: Hubble News Release
This close-up of the lit side of Saturn’s outer B ring and the Cassini Division looks something like a phonograph record. There are subtle, wavelike patterns, hundreds of narrow features resembling a record’s ‘grooves’ and a noticeable abrupt change in overall brightness beyond the dark gap near the right. To the left of the gap is the outer B ring with its sharp edge maintained by a strong gravitational resonance with the moon Mimas. To the right of the Huygens Gap are the plateau-like bands of the Cassini Division. The narrow ringlet within the gap is called the Huygens ringlet.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow angle camera on Oct. 29, 2004, at a distance of about 819,000 (509,000 miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 4.5 kilometers (2.8 miles) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and the Cassini imaging team home page, http://ciclops.org .
Twenty-five years ago, on September 28, 1979, the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) was inaugurated on top of Mauna-Kea, a 4,200-meter high dormant volcano on the island of Hawai?i.
From the photographic emulsion of the first light to today’s 340 Mega-Pixel digital camera, CHFT?s instruments are cutting edge; its camera is the largest ever built in operation on a telescope. With high-resolution or multi-object spectroscopy, adaptive optics and polarimetry, CFHT has played an important role for a quarter of a century in the development of astronomy, thanks to the support of its member agencies in Canada, France and the State of Hawaii.
Once one of the large telescopes in the world, with a mirror 3.6-m in diameter (a ‘small’ telescope by today’s standards), CFHT continues to serve the astronomical community with stunning images and groundbreaking discoveries, from the small bodies of our solar system to remote galaxies; this has been possible due to a state-of-the-art instrument complement well-suited to the relatively modest size of its mirror and the extraordinary quality of its site.
The spectacular image released today is one of the best ground-based images ever made combining wide field and high resolution. It is the result of tens of hours of telescope time spent on a single 1-degree by 1-degree field for the CFHT Legacy Survey (CFHTLS), one of CFHT’s most ambitious scientific endeavors so far. Canada and France are devoting 500 nights of telescope time to the CFHTLS over 5 years to tackle important questions in today’s astronomy.
While there are still years to go to complete the CFHTLS, this image comes as a spectacular milestone to celebrate 25 years of excellence… and counting!
Original Source: CFHT News Release