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.

Recorded on March 10 from Teide National Park on the island of Tenerife, the vista is composed of 4 separate pictures spanning over 180 degrees.

Link to article: Zodiacal Light Vs. Milky Way

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.

In the above image, red corresponds to temperatures as cold as 10 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero, while white corresponds to gas as warm at 40 Kelvins. The pink band across the lower part of the image is warm gas confined to the plane of our Galaxy. The bright regions typically hold dense molecular clouds that are slowly collapsing to form stars, whereas the dimmer regions are most usually diffuse interstellar gas and dust known as cirrus.

Why these regions have intricate filamentary shapes shared on both large and small scales remains a topic of research. Future study of the origin and evolution of dust may help in the understanding the recent history of our Galaxy as well as how planetary systems such as our Solar System came to be born.

Link to article: The Nearby Milky Way in Cold Dust

Click on image for full-size picture (1600x2391)

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.

The same type of scattering that colors the daytime sky further enhances the blue color. M78 is about five light-years across and visible through a small telescope. M78 appears above only as it was 1600 years ago, however, because that is how long it takes light to go from there to here.

M78 belongs to the larger Orion Molecular Cloud Complex that contains the Great Nebula in Orion and the Horsehead Nebula.

Link to article: M78 and Reflecting Dust Clouds in Orion

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.

Link to article: Pillar at Sunset

Click image for full-size picture (1800x1394)

Magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565 is viewed edge-on from planet Earth. Also known as the Needle Galaxy for its narrow profile, bright NGC 4565 is a stop on many telescopic tours of the northern sky, in the faint but well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices.

This sharp, colorful image reveals the galaxy’s bulging central core cut by obscuring dust lanes that lace NGC 4565′s thin galactic plane. An assortment of other galaxies is included in the pretty field of view. Neighboring galaxy NGC 4562 is at the upper right. NGC 4565 itself lies about 40 million light-years distant, spanning some 100,000 light-years.

Easily spotted with small telescopes, sky enthusiasts consider NGC 4565 to be a prominent celestial masterpiece Messier missed.

Link to article: NGC 4565: Galaxy on Edge

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.

Deep images of the night sky made with telescopes that follow the stars can also pick up geostationary satellites glinting in sunlight still shining far above the Earth’s surface. Because they all move with the Earth’s rotation against the background of stars, the satellites leave trails that seem to follow a highway across the celestial landscape.

For example, in this wide view of the nearly equatorial Orion region, individual frames were added to create a 10 minute long exposure. It shows Orion’s belt stars and well-known nebulae along with many 2.5 degree long geostationary satellite trails.

The frames are from an ingenious movie, featuring the geostationary satellite highway.

Link to article: Geostationary Highway

The snow capped Teide volcano is reflected in a pool of water in this nearly symmetric night sky view from the Canary Island Tenerife.

Bright north star Polaris stands above the peak in an exposure that also captures the brilliant trail of a polar orbiting Iridium satellite.

Of course, with the camera fixed to a tripod, the stars themselves produce concentric trails in long exposures, a reflection of the Earth’s rotation around its axis.

Large astronomical observatories also take advantage of the calm Canary Island sky.

Link to article: Teide Sky Trails

Astronomers presenting at the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting in Washington D.C. on Jan. 4, have reported the detection of the emission generated by a black hole as it devoured a white dwarf star in the elliptical galaxy NGC 1399.

This may not appear to be a huge deal to begin with — stars being eaten by supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies have been detected before — but it would appear that this particular white dwarf was ripped apart and then devoured by a mysterious “intermediate-mass” black hole.

Black holes are thought to come in all sizes and astronomers are very familiar with stellar-mass black holes (i.e. black holes that are created from single massive star supernovae) and supermassive black hole behemoths (weighing in at several million solar masses) confirmed to be living in the centers of most galaxies.

But what about the black holes in between?

Black holes measuring in the range of hundreds to thousands of solar masses have only existed in theory up till now and observational evidence of these “medium-sized” singularities has been very hard to come by. However, the NGC 1399 observation may shed some light on the existence of a particular intermediate-mass black hole in the Fornax cluster, 65 million light years from Earth.

“Astronomers have made cases for stars being torn apart by supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies before, but this is the first good evidence for such an event in a globular cluster,” said Jimmy Irwin of the University of Alabama who led the study.

Using X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra space telescope and optical data from the Magellan I and II telescopes in Las Campanas, Chile, Irwin and his colleagues were able to study an abnormally bright X-ray emission in the globular cluster.

This is known as an “ultraluminous X-ray source” (or ULX for short). By analyzing the ULX, the team was able to work out that a white dwarf had been shredded by the extreme tidal forces of a black hole and the material was being eaten by the black hole.

The observations suggest oxygen is in abundance, but there is a deficiency in hydrogen, suggesting that the material was being stripped from an old, white dwarf star. (The lack of hydrogen shows that the stellar object has burnt up its fuel, indicating the butchered star did not belong in the Main Sequence.)

Nitrogen was also detected in the spectrum, a factor that has yet to be explained.

By studying the characteristics of the material as it orbited and fell into the black hole — generating the X-rays as it was accelerated into the event horizon — the researchers were also able to deduce the black hole’s mass: approximately 1,000 suns, a mass that corresponds to a black hole in “Medium.”

Is this definitive proof of the existence of an intermediate-mass black hole killing a careless white dwarf star? Possibly, but further examination of the ULX will no doubt be forthcoming as it is thought that the X-ray emission from NGC 1399 should be persistent for some time yet.

Link to article: Intermediate black-hole implicated in star’s death

Click on image for full-size picture (1800x1150)

An asterism is just a recognized pattern of stars that is not one the 88 official constellations. For example, one of the most famous (and largest) asterisms is the Big Dipper within the constellation Ursa Major. But this pretty chain of stars, visible with binoculars towards the long-necked constellation of Camelopardalis, is also a recognized asterism. Known as Kemble’s Cascade, it contains about 20 stars nearly in a row, stretching over five times the width of a full moon.

Tumbling from the upper right to lower left in the picture, Kemble’s Cascade was made popular by astronomy enthusiast Lucian Kemble. The bright object at the lower left is the relatively compact open cluster of stars, NGC 1502.

Link to article: Kemble’s Cascade

Click image for full-size picture (3018x2804)

Galaxies of the NGC 7771 Group are featured in this intriguing skyscape. Some 200 million light-years distant toward the constellation Pegasus, NGC 7771 is the large, edge-on spiral near center, about 75,000 light-years across, with two smaller galaxies just below it. Large spiral NGC 7769 is seen face-on to the right. Galaxies of the NGC 7771 group are interacting, making repeated close passages that will ultimately result in galaxy-galaxy mergers on a cosmic timescale.

The interactions can be traced by galaxy distortions and faint streams of stars created by gravitational tides. But a clear view of the galaxy group is difficult to come by, as the deep image also reveals extensive clouds of foreground dust sweeping across the field. The dim, dusty nebulae reflect starlight from our own Milky Way Galaxy and lie only a few hundred light-years above the galactic plane.

Link to article: Dust and the NGC 7771 Group