Astronomy Images

[Haris]

Post any nice images you see. Preferrably with a name (for reference).
Any images bigger than 1000x1000 pixels should be linked and not pasted!




Part of the Carina Nebula. A pillar of hydrogen being worn away by radiation from nearby stars while stars within the pillar unleash jets of gas streaming from the peaks. The pillar is 3 light years tall.



A close-up of Jupiter's great red spot. It is a giant storm that has been raging for possibly more than 346 years. You could fit 2-3 Earths inside the spot.



Light Echoes From Red Supergiant Star V838 Monocerotis – September 2002

[Haris]

A dying star which would have been similar to our Sun.

[Haris]

A global map of mars:




Some different versions:

http://www.mapsharing.org/MS-maps/map-pages-planets-map/images-planets-map/1-planet-mars-map.jpg

http://www.astrosurf.com/nunes/render/maps/full/mars.jpg

[randolph85]

It's a galaxy whose light traveled more than 13 billion light-years before it was visible to Hubble. And it's only 600 million years younger than the universe itself.

[Haris]

That's UDFy-38135539 right? I remember reading up about it a while back

You know that it used to be the oldest known thing in the Universe until they discovered UDFj-39546284 which existed 480 million years after the big bang.




Its a compact galaxy (100 times smaller than our Milky Way) that consists of blue stars.


With the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) we'll be able to see even older galaxies. It is due to be launched in 2017/2018.

[Haris]

Stellar Cluster R136.
It is a super star cluster that is relatively young, only 1-2 million years old made up of giant and supergiant stars. It is part of the Tarantula Nebula located in the Large Magellanic Cloud which is a satelite galaxy of our Milky Way.

This is the Tarantula Nebula:


R136 is somewhere in there.

[Haris]

Noctis Labyrinthus

Dunes ripple across Mars's Noctis Labyrinthus--a sprawling region of
flatlands cut by canyons, troughs, and pits--in an August picture taken by
the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and released in October.

The snapshot, taken by the orbiter's HiRISE camera, shows light-colored
layers of iron-bearing sulfates and clay minerals exposed near the dune
field, which is close to the Martian equator.

[Haris]

Helix Nebula





Dust from comets that survived the death of their star is clouding the "eye" of the distant Helix nebula, as revealed by an image released by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope on February 12.

The nebula, which lies about 700 light-years from Earth, is the colorful remnant of a dying sunlike star that cast off its outer layers to become a white dwarf.

Similar nebulae litter our galaxy, but the Helix nebula is now among the few known to show evidence of cosmic survivors. A haze of red around the dead star at the center of the formation is most likely being caused by dust from colliding comets, NASA scientists concluded.

Before the star died, comets in the outer reaches of the system orbited in an orderly fashion. But as the dying star expanded, it blew these comets into each other's paths, so that they now jostle each other and send dust swirling around the white dwarf.

[randolph85]

i have always loved astronomy. if i had the brains for it, i would be in the field. but now i am more of an observer/fan.

[Haris]

Active Galaxy Centaurus A




The warped shape of Centaurus A's disk of gas and dust is evidence for a
past collision and merger with another galaxy. The resulting shockwaves
cause hydrogen gas clouds to compress, triggering a firestorm of new
star formation. These are visible in the red patches in this Hubble
close-up.

At a distance of just over 11 million light-years, Centaurus A contains the
closest active galactic nucleus to Earth. The center is home for a
supermassive black hole that ejects jets of high-speed gas into space, but
neither the supermassive or the jets are visible in this image.

[Haris]

'A rose made of galaxies'


This image of a pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273 was released to celebrate
the 21st anniversary of the launch of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

The distorted shape of the larger of the two galaxies shows signs of tidal interactions
with the smaller of the two. It is thought that the smaller galaxy has actually passed
through the larger one.

[Haris]

The Milky way with a misty Indian Ocean.

Spectacular image.

[Karachi]

^ those stars in the millky way are 1000's of light years away

[faye]

what an awesome photo of the milky way.
i love photos of the deep ocean creatures too. they are amazing.

[Haris]

Yeah I agree. A great image.



A view of Messier 83, a spiral galaxy.