I don’t usually post images from outside our solar system here on LITD, but this one was too good not to share! NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory made this image of the Tycho supernova remnant, an object in our Milky Way galaxy about 13,000 light years from Earth, in the constellation Cassiopeia. In visible light it…
Category: Deep Space Objects
A Matter of Scale
One of the things that fascinates me so much about the Universe is the incredible vastness of scale, distance and size. On Earth we have virtually nothing to compare to the kinds of sizes seen in space. We look up at the stars and planets in the night sky but they are just bright points…
Lesson Learned
Another good one from the awesome that is xkcd. Brilliant. The Stingray Nebula (Hen-1357) is one of the youngest known planetary nebula – the result of a dying star shedding its outer layers and illuminating the expanding gas with radiation. Located in the southern constellation Ara (the Altar) the Stingray Nebula is 18,000 light-years away….
VLT: A Space Opera
Here’s an enchanting video by the European Southern Observatory highlighting the discoveries of their Very Large Telescope (VLT) array, high in the mountains of the Atacama Desert in Chile. The Atacama is the driest place on Earth, far from the light pollution of major cities, and thus provides the clearest, darkest skies allowing these massive…
Inside a Black Hole
Unlike the typical artist’s portrayal of a black hole as being surrounded by a massive glowing accretion disk of inwardly-swirling matter, like some sort of galactic bathtub drain, this scenario shows a rather naked-looking black hole exerting a lensing effect on the background field of stars. This is a result of a new simulator application…
Billions and Billions
Talk about lights in the dark! The image above is a low-res version of what amounts to 22 months of dedicated work by Central Michigan University astronomer Axel Mellinger, traveling across the United States and South Africa and assembling over 3,000 individual images to create the most extensive and detailed – and zoomable – portrait…
A Beautiful Demise
I don’t usually post images of deep-space objects here but I had to make an exception for this one. With its most recent set of optics, installed in May 2009 during the STS-125 servicing mission (SM4), the Hubble Space Telescope is returning amazingly detailed images of distant, exotic objects – like the butterfly-shaped planetary nebula NGC 6302,…
Lights in the Dark 