Category: Photography

Zodiacal Light Vs. Milky Way

Posted by Nexus – 23/03/2010

[via APOD]

Ghostly Zodiacal light, featured near the center of this remarkable panorama, is produced as sunlight is scattered by dust in the Solar System’s ecliptic plane.

In the weeks surrounding the March equinox (today at 1732 UT) Zodiacal light is more prominent after sunset in the northern hemisphere, and before sunrise in the south, when the ecliptic makes a steep angle with the horizon.

In the picture, the narrow triangle of Zodiacal light extends above the western horizon and seems to end at the lovely Pleiades star cluster. Arcing above the Pleiades are stars and nebulae along the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy.

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The Nearby Milky Way in Cold Dust

Posted by Nexus – 23/03/2010

[via APOD]

What shapes the remarkable dust tapestry of the nearby Milky Way Galaxy? No one knows for sure. The intricate structures, shown above, were resolved in new detail recently in a wide region of the sky imaged in far infrared light by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite.

The above image is a digital fusion of three infrared colors: two taken at high resolution by Planck, while the other is an older image taken by the now defunct IRAS satellite. At these colors, the sky is dominated by the faint glow of very cold gas within only 500 light years of Earth.

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M78 and Reflecting Dust Clouds in Orion

Posted by Nexus – 09/03/2010

[via APOD]

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An eerie blue glow and ominous columns of dark dust highlight M78 and other bright reflection nebula in the constellation of Orion.

The dark filamentary dust not only absorbs light, but also reflects the light of several bright blue stars that formed recently in the nebula. Of the two reflection nebulas pictured above, the more famous nebula is M78, in the image center, while NGC 2071 can be seen to its lower left.

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Mars Over the Allalinhorn

Posted by Nexus – 09/03/2010

[via APOD]

What’s that bright object in the sky? A common question with answers that vary by time and season, the quick answer just after sunset in middle of last month, from the northern hemisphere, was Mars.

The above picturesque panorama, taken during a ski trip from the Alps in Switzerland, shows not only Mars, but much more. Pine trees line the foreground, while numerous slopes leading up to the snow covered Allalinhorn mountain are visible in the distance.

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Pillar at Sunset

Posted by Nexus – 08/03/2010

[via APOD]

Reddened light from the setting Sun illuminates the cloud banks hugging this snowy, rugged terrain.

Inspiring a moment of quiet contemplation, the sunset scene included a remarkable pillar of light that seemed to connect the clouds in the sky with the mountains below. Known as a Sun pillar, the luminous column was produced by sunlight reflecting from flat, six-sided ice crystals formed high in the cold atmosphere and fluttering toward the ground.

Last Monday, astronomers watched this Sun pillar slowly fade, as the twilight deepened and clearing, dark skies came to Mt. Jelm and the Wyoming Infrared Observatory.

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Wall-E Case Mod (56k warning)

Posted by Nexus – 05/03/2010

[via picsroll.com]

Warning: many pictures.

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Chasing Carina

Posted by Nexus – 27/02/2010

[via APOD]

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A jewel of the southern sky, the Great Carina Nebula, aka NGC 3372, spans over 300 light-years.

Near the upper right of this expansive skyscape, it is much larger than the more northerly Orion Nebula. In fact, the Carina Nebula is one of our galaxy’s largest star-forming regions and home to young, extremely massive stars, including the still enigmatic variable Eta Carinae, a star with well over 100 times the mass of the Sun.

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Geostationary Highway

Posted by Nexus – 21/02/2010

Put a satellite in a circular orbit about 42,000 kilometres from the center of the Earth (36,000 kilometres or so above the surface) and it will orbit once in 24 hours. Because that matches Earth’s rotation period, it is known as a geosynchronous orbit. If that orbit is also in the plane of the equator, the satellite will hang in the sky over a fixed location in a geostationary orbit.

As predicted in the 1940s by futurist Arthur C. Clarke, geostationary orbits are in common use for communication and weather satellites, a scenario now well-known to astroimagers.

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WISE Infrared Andromeda

Posted by Nexus – 20/02/2010

[via APOD]

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This sharp, wide-field view features infrared light from the spiral Andromeda Galaxy (M31). Dust heated by Andromeda’s young stars is shown in yellow and red, while its older population of stars appears as a bluish haze.

The false-color skyscape is a mosaic of images from NASA’s new Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite. With over twice the diameter of our Milky Way, Andromeda is the largest galaxy in the local group. Andromeda’s own satellite galaxies M110 (below) and M32 (above) are also included in the combined fields.

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Dark Shuttle Approaching

Posted by Nexus – 17/02/2010

[via APOD]

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What’s that approaching? Astronauts on board the International Space Station first saw it far in the distance. Soon it enlarged to become a dark silhouette. As it came even closer, the silhouette appeared to be a spaceship. Finally, at just past 11 pm (CST) last Tuesday, the object, revealed to be the Space Shuttle Endeavour, docked as expected with the Earth-orbiting space station.

Pictured above, Endeavour was imaged near Earth’s horizon as it approached, where several layers of the Earth’s atmosphere were visible. Directly behind the shuttle is the mesosphere, which appears blue. The atmospheric layer that appears white is the stratosphere, while the orange layer is Earth’s Troposphere.

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