I just saw the moon

[CrazyDiamond]

A rising Full Corn Moon was captured early this month in time-lapse with a telephoto lens from nearly 30 kilometers away -- making Earth's ascending half-degree companion appear unusually impressive. The image was captured from Portugal, although much of the foreground -- including lights from the village of Puebla de Guzmán -- is in Spain. A Full Corn Moon is the name attributed to a full moon at this time of year by cultures of some northern indigenous peoples of the Americas, as it coincides with the ripening of corn. Note that the Moon does not appear larger when it is nearer the horizon -- its seemingly larger size there is only an illusion. The next full moon -- occurring at the beginning of next month -- will be known as the Full Harvest Moon as it occurs nearest in time to the northern autumnal equinox and the northern field harvests. Photo by Zarcos Palma

Do you recognize the constellation of Orion? It may be harder than usual in today's featured image because the camera has zoomed in on the center, and the exposure is long enough to enhance nebulas beyond what the unaided human eye can see. Still, once you become oriented, you can see Orion's three belt stars lined up vertically near the image center, and even locate the familiar Orion Nebula on the upper left. Famous faint features that are also visible include the dark Horsehead Nebula indentation near the image center, and the dusty Flame Nebula just to its right. Part of the Orion-encircling Barnard's Loop can also be found on the far right. The image combines multiple sky-tracking shots of the background in different colors with a single static foreground exposure taken at twilight -- all captured with the same camera and from the same location. The picturesque scene was captured from the mountains in San Juan, Argentina. Photo by Nicolas Tabbush

NGC 2359 is a helmet-shaped cosmic cloud with wing-like appendages popularly called Thor's Helmet. Heroically sized even for a Norse god, Thor's Helmet is about 30 light-years across. In fact, the helmet is more like an interstellar bubble, blown as a fast wind from the bright, massive star near the bubble's center inflates a region within the surrounding molecular cloud. Known as a Wolf-Rayet star, the central star is an extremely hot giant thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova stage of evolution. NGC 2359 is located about 15,000 light-years away in the constellation of the Great Overdog. The remarkably sharp image is a mixed cocktail of data from broadband and narrowband filters using three different telescopes. It captures natural looking stars and the details of the nebula's filamentary structures. The predominant bluish hue is strong emission from doubly ionized oxygen atoms in the glowing gas.

 

[NYC_Frank]

Nice GIF of Asteroid Vesta by NASA probe Dawn

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR

 

[CrazyDiamond]

Star, Planet, Nebula, Galaxy in this post.
The general trend of monthly sunspot data now confirms that the minimum of the approximately 11 year cycle of solar activity occurred in December 2019, marking the start of Solar Cycle 25. That quiet Sun, at minimum activity, appears on the right of this split hemispherical view. In contrast, the left side shows the active Sun at the recognized maximum of Solar Cycle 24, captured in April 2014. The extreme ultraviolet images from the orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory highlight coronal loops and active regions in the light of highly ionized iron atoms. Driving the space weather around our fair planet, Solar Cycle 24 was a relatively calm one and predictions are that cycle 25 will be calm too. The cycle 25 activity maximum is expected in July 2025. Solar Cycle 1, the first solar cycle determined from early records of sunspot data, is considered to begin with a minimum in February 1755.

Ever since Voyager 2 beamed home spectacular images of the planets in the 1980s, planet-lovers have been hooked on extra-terrestrial aurora. Aurora are caused by streams of charged particles like electrons, that come from various origins such as solar winds, the planetary ionosphere, and moon volcanism. They become caught in powerful magnetic fields and are channeled into the upper atmosphere, where their interactions with gas particles, such as oxygen or nitrogen, set off spectacular bursts of light.
The alien aurora on Jupiter and Saturn are well-studied, but not much is known about the aurora of the giant ice planet Uranus. In 2011, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope became the first Earth-based telescope to snap an image of the aurora on Uranus. In 2012 and 2014 a team led by an astronomer from Paris Observatory took a second look at the aurora using the ultraviolet capabilities of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) installed on Hubble.
They tracked the interplanetary shocks caused by two powerful bursts of solar wind traveling from the Sun to Uranus, then used Hubble to capture their effect on Uranus’ aurora — and found themselves observing the most intense aurora ever seen on the planet. By watching the aurora over time, they collected the first direct evidence that these powerful shimmering regions rotate with the planet (they appear the way they do because Uranus rotates pretty much on it's side). They also re-discovered Uranus’ long-lost magnetic poles, which were lost shortly after their discovery by Voyager 2 in 1986 due to uncertainties in measurements and the featureless planet surface.
This is a composite image of Uranus by Voyager 2 and two different observations made by Hubble — one for the ring and one for the aurora.

Glowing like a multi-faceted jewel, the planetary nebula IC 418 lies about 2000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lepus. In this picture, the Hubble telescope reveals some remarkable textures weaving through the nebula. Their origin, however, is still uncertain.

This mosaic image of the magnificent starburst galaxy, Messier 82 (M82) is the sharpest wide-angle view ever obtained of M82. It is a galaxy remarkable for its webs of shredded clouds and flame-like plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out from its central regions where young stars are being born 10 times faster than they are inside in our Milky Way Galaxy.

 

[CrazyDiamond]

Peculiar spiral galaxy Arp 78 is found within the boundaries of the head strong constellation Aries, some 100 million light-years beyond the stars and nebula of our Milky Way galaxy. Also known as NGC 772, the island universe is over 100,000 light-years across and sports a single prominent outer spiral arm in this detailed cosmic portrait. Its brightest companion galaxy, compact NGC 770, is toward the upper right of the larger spiral. NGC 770's fuzzy, elliptical appearance contrasts nicely with a spiky foreground Milky Way star in matching yellowish hues. Tracking along sweeping dust lanes and lined with young blue star clusters, Arp 78's large spiral arm is likely due to gravitational tidal interactions. Faint streams of material seem to connect Arp 78 with its nearby companion galaxies.

This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina. Scorching radiation and fast winds (streams of charged particles) from super-hot newborn stars in the nebula are shaping and compressing the pillar, causing new stars to form within it. Streamers of hot ionised gas can be seen flowing off the ridges of the structure, and wispy veils of gas and dust, illuminated by starlight, float around its towering peaks. The denser parts of the pillar are resisting being eroded by radiation.
Nestled inside this dense mountain are fledgling stars. Long streamers of gas can be seen shooting in opposite directions from the pedestal at the top of the image. Another pair of jets is visible at another peak near the center of the image. These jets, known as HH 901 and HH 902, respectively, are signposts for new star birth and are launched by swirling gas and dust discs around the young stars, which allow material to slowly accrete onto the stellar surfaces. The colors in this composite image correspond to the glow of oxygen (blue), hydrogen and nitrogen (green), and sulfur (red).

This latest image of Jupiter, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope on August 25, 2020, was captured when the planet was 653 million kilometers from Earth. Hubble’s sharp view is giving researchers an updated weather report on the monster planet’s turbulent atmosphere, including a remarkable new storm brewing, and a cousin of the Great Red Spot changing color — again. The new image also features Jupiter’s icy moon Europa.

 

[CrazyDiamond]

This Hubble Space Telescope view shows one of the most dynamic and intricately detailed star-forming regions in space, located 210,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. At the center of the region is a brilliant star cluster called NGC 346. A dramatic structure of arched, ragged filaments with a distinct ridge surrounds the cluster.
A torrent of radiation from the hot stars in the cluster NGC 346, at the center of this Hubble image, eats into denser areas around it, creating a fantasy sculpture of dust and gas. The dark, intricately beaded edge of the ridge, seen in silhouette, is particularly dramatic. It contains several small dust globules that point back towards the central cluster, like windsocks caught in a gale.

This picture, taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), shows a galaxy known as NGC 6872 in the constellation of Pavo (The Peacock). Its unusual shape is caused by its interactions with the smaller galaxy that can be seen just above NGC 6872, called IC 4970. They both lie roughly 300 million light-years away from Earth.
From tip to tip, NGC 6872 measures over 500 000 light-years across, making it the second largest spiral galaxy discovered to date. In terms of size it is beaten only by NGC 262, a galaxy that measures a mind-boggling 1.3 million light-years in diameter! To put that into perspective, our own galaxy, the Milky Way, measures between 100 000 and 120 000 light-years across, making NGC 6872 about five times its size.
The upper left spiral arm of NGC 6872 is visibly distorted and is populated by star-forming regions, which appear blue on this image. This may have been be caused by IC 4970 recently passing through this arm — although here, recent means 130 million years ago! Astronomers have noted that NGC 6872 seems to be relatively sparse in terms of free hydrogen, which is the basis material for new stars, meaning that if it weren’t for its interactions with IC 4970, NGC 6872 might not have been able to produce new bursts of star formation.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured this striking image of the planetary nebula NGC 5189. The intricate structure of the stellar eruption looks like a giant and brightly colored ribbon in space.

 

[macbill]

New measurements show moon has hazardous radiation levels

Future moon explorers will be bombarded with two to three times more radiation than astronauts aboard the International Space Station, a health hazard that will require thick-walled shelters for protection, scientists reported Friday.

 

[CrazyDiamond]

Exactly why I believe that the bases on the moon will be in extinct lava tubes that are found there; provides natural shielding. Nothing else needed for the radiation if going underground.

 

[NYC_Frank]

Space rock skims Earth’s atmosphere, observed by the global meteor network (ESA Operations) ☄

In the early hours of 22 Sept over N. Germany & the Netherlands, a meteoroid got down to 91 km in altitude - far below orbiting satellites - before it ‘bounced’ back into space ...

2020 aint over yet ...

 

[CrazyDiamond]

This stunning image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy NGC 5643 in the constellation of Lupus (The Wolf). Thirty different exposures, for a total of 9 hours observation time, together with the high resolution and clarity of Hubble, were needed to produce an image of such high level of detail and of beauty.

The twisting patterns created by the multiple spiral arms of NGC 2835 create the illusion of an eye. This is a fitting description, as this magnificent galaxy resides near the head of the southern constellation of Hydra, the water snake. This stunning barred spiral galaxy, with a width of just over half that of the Milky Way, is brilliantly featured in this image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Although it cannot be seen in this image, a supermassive black hole with a mass millions of times that of our Sun is known to nestle in the very center of NGC 2835.

The galaxies — also known as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039 — are locked in a deadly embrace. Once normal, sedate spiral galaxies like the Milky Way, the pair have spent the past few hundred million years sparring with one another. This clash is so violent that stars have been ripped from their host galaxies to form a streaming arc between the two. In wide-field images of the pair the reason for their name becomes clear — far-flung stars and streamers of gas stretch out into space, creating long tidal tails reminiscent of antennae.
Clouds of gas are seen in bright pink and red, surrounding the bright flashes of blue star-forming regions — some of which are partially obscured by dark patches of dust. The rate of star formation is so high that the Antennae Galaxies are said to be in a state of starburst, a period in which all of the gas within the galaxies is being used to form stars. This cannot last forever and neither can the separate galaxies; eventually the nuclei will coalesce, and the galaxies will begin their retirement together as one large elliptical galaxy.

 

[NYC_Frank]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1310576244006752257

 

[macbill]

Mars: it's not just a candy company. Salty lake, ponds may be gurgling beneath...
A network of salty ponds may be gurgling beneath Mars’ South Pole alongside a large underground lake, raising the prospect of tiny, swimming Martian life.

 

[GetLeft]

Mars not happy

 

[CrazyDiamond]

Jumping on the Mars train....supposedly the "best" image ever taken by an Earth telescope. Yes it's Hubble and it does qualify as Earth-based; it's just not on the surface. In this image, Hubble can see details as small as 10 miles (16 km) across. Especially striking is the large amount of seasonal dust storm activity seen in this image. One large storm system is churning high above the northern polar cap [top of image], and a smaller dust storm cloud can be seen nearby. Another large dust storm is spilling out of the giant Hellas impact basin in the Southern Hemisphere [lower right].

 

[CrazyDiamond]

First Image of a Black Hole-he Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the center of Messier 87 and its shadow.
The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. While this may sound large, this ring is only about 40 micro-arc-seconds across — equivalent to measuring the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon.
Although the telescopes making up the EHT are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks — hydrogen masers — which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data – roughly 350 terabytes per day – which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialized supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.

This image is of a spectacular stellar nursery called IC 2944. Thick clouds of dust, known as the Thackeray globules, are silhouetted against the pale pink glowing gas of the nebula. These globules are under fierce bombardment from the ultraviolet radiation from nearby hot young stars. They are both being eroded away and also fragmenting, rather like lumps of butter dropped onto a hot frying pan. It is likely that Thackeray’s globules will be destroyed before they can collapse and form new stars.

The OmegaCAM imager on the VLT Survey Telescope has captured this glittering view of the stellar nursery called Sharpless 29. Many astronomical phenomena can be seen in this giant image, including cosmic dust and gas clouds that reflect, absorb, and re-emit the light of hot young stars within the nebula.

This image of the reflection nebula Messier 78 was captured using the Wide Field Imager camera on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory, Chile. This color picture was created from many monochrome exposures taken through blue, yellow/green and red filters, supplemented by exposures through a filter that isolates light from glowing hydrogen gas. The total exposure times were 9, 9, 17.5 and 15.5 minutes per filter, respectively.

 

[CrazyDiamond]

Just saw this and had to post.... Seventy-million light-years away in the scenic spiral galaxy NGC 2525, a white dwarf exploded and the Hubble Space Telescope witnessed its last days. NASA and the European Space Agency which jointly run Hubble, released a rare time-lapse of the supernova's fading brightness. The space telescope first started watching the supernova, named SN 2018gv, in February 2018. The time-lapse covers almost a year of Hubble observations.

 

[stark1]

My new toy, in the age of MAGA-Low-Maniacs

 

[CrazyDiamond]

The Milky Way arches across this rare 360-degree panorama of the night sky above the Paranal platform, home of ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The image was made from 37 individual frames with a total exposure time of about 30 minutes, taken in the early morning hours. The Moon is just rising and the zodiacal light shines above it, while the Milky Way stretches across the sky opposite the observatory.
The open telescope domes of the world’s most advanced ground-based astronomical observatory are all visible in the image: the four smaller 1.8-metre Auxiliary Telescopes that can be used together in the interferometric mode, and the four giant 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes. To the right in the image and below the arc of the Milky Way, two of our galactic neighbors, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, can be seen.

A total eclipse of the Moon is an impressive spectacle. But it also provides another viewing opportunity: a dark, moonlight-free starry sky. At Cerro Paranal in the Chilean Atacama Desert, one of the most remote places in the world, the distance from sources of light pollution makes the night sky all the more remarkable during a total lunar eclipse.
This panorama photo, taken by ESO Photo Ambassador Yuri Beletsky, shows the view of the starry sky from the site of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Cerro Paranal during the total lunar eclipse of 21 December 2010. The reddish disc of the Moon is seen on the right of the image, while the Milky Way arches across the heavens in all its beauty. Another faint glow of light is also visible, surrounding the brilliant planet Venus in the bottom left corner of the picture. This phenomenon, known as zodiacal light, is produced by sunlight reflecting off dust in the plane of the planets. It is so faint that it’s normally obscured by moonlight or light pollution.
During a total lunar eclipse, the Earth’s shadow blocks direct sunlight from the Moon. The Moon is still visible, red in color because only light rays at the red end of the spectrum are able to reach the Moon after being redirected through the Earth’s atmosphere (the blue and green light rays are scattered much more strongly).

@NYC_Frank a kind of veil maybe? The oddly shaped Pencil Nebula (NGC 2736) is pictured in this image from ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. This nebula is a small part of a huge remnant left over after a supernova explosion that took place about 11 000 years ago. The image was produced by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Two of the sky’s more famous residents share the stage with a lesser-known neighbor in this enormous three gigapixel image from ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST). On the right lies the faint, glowing cloud of gas called Sharpless 2-54, the iconic Eagle Nebula (Messier 16) is in the center, and the Omega Nebula (Messier 17) to the left. This cosmic trio makes up just a portion of a vast complex of gas and dust within which new stars are springing to life and illuminating their surroundings.

 

[cybrguy]

That last photo just became the wallpaper on my phone. These are all great shots and I just love seeing them. Thanks @CrazyDiamond .

 

[NYC_Frank]

Ditto @CrazyDiamond ... keep those veil snaps coming ... very much appreciated

 

[CrazyDiamond]

@cybrguy and @NYC_Frank thank you for the kind words, it is very much appreciated. I wish I could post the full resolution of these but the forum software only allows up to a certain size; these are great, but the full size ones are glorious on big screens. I actually have a lot of these images as consecutive screen savers on my dual monitors at work, lol (as well as SpaceX rockets). I am, and have been for a good chunk of the past 10 years or so, been completely fascinated by what science brings us, especially all this imagery. I was sitting around the other day and I started thinking about black holes and the Big Bang and without really knowing that it was already a legit theory being bounced about, I thought why wouldn't the "bottom" of a black hole not result in a huge energetic burst, like the big bang. You are crushing enormous amounts of matter down to a minuscule point, wouldn't that create enormous amounts of frictional heat? So much so that the gravity could not contain it anymore and it rips into another "universe", "continuum", "realm", whatever? I thought this because of E=mc^2, the c^2 I think Einstein used just to represent a huge number. Now I haven't and won't do the math but I would think instead of c maybe it should be what the force of gravity would be on matter as it's mass approaches infinity? Ya, stoned...so then I actually looked it up and is is mind blowing. Some think that our "big bang" was really a 4th dimensional star going supernova then it's core collapsing into a 3 dimensional black hole with it's singularity at the "bottom" of it being the energy/matter release that created our universe. Then it's postulated that our black holes' singularities form 2 dimensional universes.
I will stop now and post pics!!!!

This image shows the disc around the young AB Aurigae star, where ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has spotted signs of planet birth. Close to the center of the image, in the inner region of the disc, we see the ‘twist’ (in very bright yellow) that scientists believe marks the spot where a planet is forming. This twist lies at about the same distance from the AB Aurigae star as Neptune from the Sun.
The image was obtained with the VLT’s SPHERE instrument in polarized light.

This beautiful veilish structure is what remains of a massive star that ended its life with a supernova explosion some 11,000 years ago. The core of the star collapsed, forming a pulsar, while the outermost layers were ejected into the interstellar medium, producing the filaments that we still observe. This supernova remnant is located some 800 light years away, in the southern constellation of Vela (The Sails). The astrophotograph was taken from ESO's La Silla Observatory.

The nearby star-forming region around the star R Coronae Australis imaged by the Wide Field Imager (WFI) on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. This picture, which covers a field of 33.7 x 31.9 arcminutes (about the diameter of the full Moon), is a combination of twelve CCD frames, 67 megapixels each, taken through B, V and R filters, with four exposures of five minutes each.

This image, the first to be released publicly from VISTA, the world’s largest survey telescope, shows the spectacular star-forming region known as the Flame Nebula, or NGC 2024, in the constellation of Orion (the Hunter) and its surroundings. In views of this evocative object in visible light the core of the nebula is completely hidden behind obscuring dust, but in this VISTA view, taken in infrared light, the cluster of very young stars at the object’s heart is revealed. The wide-field VISTA view also includes the glow of the reflection nebula NGC 2023, just below center, and the ghostly outline of the Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) towards the lower right. The bright bluish star towards the right is one of the three bright stars forming the Belt of Orion. The image was created from VISTA images taken through J, H and Ks filters in the near-infrared part of the spectrum. The image shows about half the area of the full VISTA field and is about 40 x 50 arcminutes in extent. The total exposure time was 14 minutes.

Color composite image of Centaurus A, revealing the lobes and jets emanating from the active galaxy’s central black hole. This is a composite of images obtained with three instruments, operating at very different wavelengths. The 870-micron submillimeter data, from LABOCA on APEX, are shown in orange. X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory are shown in blue. Visible light data from the Wide Field Imager (WFI) on the MPG/ESO 2.2 m telescope located at La Silla, Chile, show the stars and the galaxy’s characteristic dust lane in close to "true colour".

 

[CrazyDiamond]

Holy crap! It's finally fully assembled and has passed rigorous environmental tests! That's right , The James Webb Space Telescope is getting closer!
Article Here

The next image is the Eye of Sauron...just kidding...an exoplanet image...
Fomalhaut and Fomalhaut b is the system...
This image, taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the newly discovered planet, Fomalhaut b, orbiting its parent star, Fomalhaut.
The small white box at lower right pinpoints the planet's location. Fomalhaut b has carved a path along the inner edge of a vast, dusty debris ring encircling Fomalhaut that is 34.5 billion kilometers across. Fomalhaut b lies three billion kilometers inside the ring's inner edge and orbits 17 billion kilometers from its star.
The inset at bottom right is a composite image showing the planet's position during Hubble observations taken in 2004 and 2006. Astronomers have calculated that Fomalhaut b completes an orbit around its parent star every 872 years.
The white dot in the center of the image marks the star's location. The region around Fomalhaut's location is black because astronomers used the Advanced Camera's corona-graph to block out the star's bright glare so that the dim planet could be seen. Fomalhaut b is 100 million times fainter than its star. The radial streaks are scattered starlight. The red dot at lower left is a background star.
The Fomalhaut system is 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new image of Herbig-Haro 110, a geyser of hot gas flowing from a newborn star. HH 110 appears different from most other Herbig-Haro objects: in particular, it appears on its own while they usually come in pairs. Astronomers think it may be a continuation of another object called HH 270, after it has been deflected off a dense cloud of gas.

This Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image reveals a pair of one-half light-year long interstellar 'twisters' - eerie funnels and twisted-rope structures - in the heart of the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8) which lies 5,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius.

 

[CrazyDiamond]

Death by Spaghettification: ESO Telescopes Record Last Moments of Star Devoured by a Black Hole​

Article here https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso2018/

 

[cybrguy]

How cool is that to capture that event. Truly fascinating.

 

[CrazyDiamond]

@cybrguy I try and imagine the scientists reactions as the image unfolds. I bet every time they see something new they react like they do when scientists saw the first images Hubble produced after it's vision was corrected (love that video of them fully geeking out).

Got some more images...
Almost reminds me of a Shadow vessel from Babylon 5, lol.
This picture shows Barnard 59, part of a vast dark cloud of interstellar dust called the Pipe Nebula. This new and very detailed image of what is known as a dark nebula was captured by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory.

The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile has captured this beautifully detailed image of the galaxy Messier 33, often called the Triangulum Galaxy. This nearby spiral, the second closest large galaxy to our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is packed with bright star clusters, and clouds of gas and dust. This picture is amongst the most detailed wide-field views of this object ever taken and shows the many glowing red gas clouds in the spiral arms with particular clarity.

I've posted images of the Carina Nebula before, but not photgraphed at this wavelength. Observations made with the APEX telescope in submillimetre-wavelength light at a wavelength of 870 µm reveal the cold dusty clouds from which stars form in the Carina Nebula. This site of violent star formation, which plays host to some of the highest-mass stars in our galaxy, is an ideal arena in which to study the interactions between these young stars and their parent molecular clouds.
The APEX observations, made with its LABOCA camera, are shown here in orange tones, combined with a visible light image from the Curtis Schmidt telescope at the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory. The result is a dramatic, wide-field picture that provides a spectacular view of Carina’s star formation sites. The nebula contains stars equivalent to over 25,000 Suns, and the total mass of gas and dust clouds is that of about 140,000 Suns.

 

[CrazyDiamond]

We haven't had posts of Jupiter lately so let's go visit Jupiter with the Juno probe.
This video uses images from NASA’s Juno mission to recreate what it might have looked like to ride along with the Juno spacecraft as it performed its 27th close flyby of Jupiter on June 2, 2020.
During the closest approach of this pass, the Juno spacecraft came within approximately 2,100 miles (3,400 kilometers) of Jupiter’s cloud tops. At that point, Jupiter’s powerful gravity accelerated the spacecraft to tremendous speed – about 130,000 mph (209,000 kilometers per hour) relative to the planet.

Thick white clouds are present in this JunoCam image of Jupiter's equatorial zone. These clouds complicate the interpretation of infrared measurements of water. At microwave frequencies, the same clouds are transparent, allowing Juno's Microwave Radiometer to measure water deep into Jupiter's atmosphere.

This view of Jupiter’s atmosphere from NASA’s Juno spacecraft includes something remarkable: two storms caught in the act of merging.
The two white ovals seen within the orange-colored band left of center are anticyclonic storms — that is, storms that rotate counter-clockwise. The larger of the two ovals has been tracked for many years, as it grew in size through mergers with other anticyclonic white ovals. JunoCam was fortunate to capture this new merger, which typically takes place over the course of only a few days. The event interests scientists because the ovals had approached each other months earlier, only to move apart again.
This merger may be the result of perturbations due to the proximity of Oval BA, which is the larger storm just to the north of the two merging, white ovals. Oval BA is the second largest anticyclonic vortex in Jupiter's atmosphere, second only to the famous Great Red Spot. During this pass over Jupiter, Juno gave scientists their best views of Oval BA to date.

This enhanced-color image from NASA’s Juno spacecraft captures the striking cloud bands of Jupiter’s southern latitudes. Jupiter is not only the largest planet in the solar system, it also rotates at the fastest rate, completing a full day in just 10 hours. This rapid spinning creates strong jet streams, separating Jupiter’s clouds into bright zones and dark belts that wrap around the planet.