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This is not the first picture you’ve seen of the Helix Nebula, but it’s the best image so far. The Helix Nebula is a cloud of gas that was left when a star expired 700 light years away from us.
This image is in the near-infrared, taken using the European Southern Observatory’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), a 4.1 meter telescope in Chile. Equipped with a whopping 67 megapixel camera it can take pictures of large areas of the sky. The Helix nebula fits that bill: it’s close enough to us that it’s nearly the size of the full Moon in the sky.
You are right, this would make an awesome desktop wallpaper! You can download the huge version if you like, and get more details about the Eye of Sauron Helix Nebula at Bad Astronomy. Link
(Image credit: ESO/VISTA/J. Emerson/Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit)
This unusual nebula, officially and rather dully named HH-222, stretches across ten light years of space. What caused its shape to form? NASA officials say, “One hypothesis is that the gas filament results from the wind from a young star impacting a nearby molecular cloud.”
Link | Photo: Zoltan G. Levay, NASA
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Environmental Graffiti has a great collection of pictures of The Orion Nebula for your viewing pleasure. After viewing them all, I can’t help but think they should take over as the Rorschach Test of the new century. I see an astronaut with bird wings, what about you?
This is a cloud that has broken off the Carina Nebula. It’s about 8,000 light years away and has a nasty attitude. Or did, at least 8,000 years ago. Did we do something offensive at the time?
Link via Geekologie | Photo: NASA
NASA worked with Braille experts to create a tactile representation of the Carina Nebula:
The 17-by-11-inch color image is embossed with lines, slashes, and other markings that correspond to objects in the giant cloud, allowing visually impaired people to feel what they cannot see and form a picture of the nebula in their minds. The image’s design is also useful and intriguing for sighted people who have different learning styles.
“The Hubble image of the Carina Nebula is so beautiful, and it illustrates the entire life cycle of stars,” says Mutchler, who, along with Grice, unveiled the tactile Carina image in January 2010, at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. “I thought that people who are visually impaired should be able to explore it and learn from it, too.”
(image credit: Travis A. Rector/U of Alaska Anchorage/Heidi Schweiker/NOAO)
Photo: NASA/CXC/SAO/P.Slane et al.
Actually, it’s the image of a nebula surrounding a young pulsar known as PSR B1509-58, as taken by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy blog explains:
If you look at the wrist of the hand, you’ll see a brighter swirl of gas. In the center of that blob is a tiny object, a neutron star called B1509: an incredibly dense sphere of subatomic particles, leftover when a massive star goes supernova. While the outer layers of the star explode outwards, the core of the star collapses, cramming twice the mass of the Sun into a ball only a few kilometers across. This newly born neutron star — called that because the pressure is so great in the collapsed object that electrons and protons are rammed together to form neutrons — is basically the definition of the word incredible: it spins several times per second, has a surface gravity millions of times that of the Earth (if you were on the surface you’d be crushed flatter than a good science fiction program’s chances to be renewed on Fox), and has a magnetic field 30 trillion times that of the Earth’s.
Link | Chandra X-Ray Observatory
