Idle Nutt

A Fox Fur, a Unicorn, and a Christmas Tree

image credit: Rolf Geissinger

APOD:

What do the following things have in common: a cone, the fur of a fox, and a Christmas tree? Answer: they all occur in the constellation of the unicorn (Monoceros)….Its cast of cosmic characters includes the Fox Fur Nebula, whose convoluted pelt lies below center, bright variable star S Mon immersed in the blue-tinted haze, and the Cone Nebula near the tree’s top.

(via APOD)

The transit of Venus across the Sun in 2004.

The next transit is this June 5 or 6.  After that, it’ll be more than a hundred years until the next one.

photo credit:  David Cortner

Here’s a NASA simulation of the transit.

(via WSJ)

Ultraviolet image of the Cygnus Loop nebula. 

WSJ:

The nebula is the afterglow of a massive supernova that exploded 5000 to 8000 years ago—the shockwave from the blast is still spreading outwards. The explosion would have been bright enough to be viewed from Earth with the naked eye….The nebula lies about 1,500 light-years away, and about is six times the diameter of the full Moon.

photo credit:  NASA

(via WSJ)

Messier 9 Close-up

image credit: ESA/Hubble, NASA

(via APOD)

The Sombrero Galaxy in Infrared

image credit:  R. Kennicutt (Steward Obs.) et al., SSC, JPL, Caltech, NASA

(via APOD)

The Rosette Nebula

image credit:  Brian Davis

APOD:

The Rosette Nebula is not the only cosmic cloud of gas and dust to evoke the imagery of flowers — but it is the most famous. At the edge of a large molecular cloud in Monoceros, some 5,000 light years away, the petals of this rose are actually a stellar nursery whose lovely, symmetric shape is sculpted by the winds and radiation from its central cluster of hot young stars. The stars in the energetic cluster, cataloged as NGC 2244, are only a few million years old, while the central cavity in the Rosette Nebula, cataloged as NGC 2237, is about 50 light-years in diameter. The nebula can be seen firsthand with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Unicorn (Monoceros).

(via APOD: 2012 February 14 - The Rosette Nebula)

Dust of the Orion Nebula

image credit: Nicolás Villegas

APOD:

What surrounds a hotbed of star formation? In the case of the Orion Nebula — dust. The entire Orion field, located about 1600 light years away, is inundated with intricate and picturesque filaments of dust. Opaque to visible light, dust is created in the outer atmosphere of massive cool stars and expelled by a strong outer wind of particles. The Trapezium and other forming star clusters are embedded in the nebula. The intricate filaments of dust surrounding M42 and M43 appear brown in the above image, while central glowing gas is highlighted in red. Over the next few million years much of Orion’s dust will be slowly destroyed by the very stars now being formed, or dispersed into the Galaxy.

(via APOD: 2012 February 6 - Dust of the Orion Nebula)

Infrared image of the Carina Nebula.

ESO:

ESO’s Very Large Telescope has delivered the most detailed infrared image of the Carina Nebula stellar nursery taken so far. Many previously hidden features, scattered across a spectacular celestial landscape of gas, dust and young stars, have emerged. This is one of the most dramatic images ever created by the VLT.

(via ESO and ScienceDaily)

Red Aurora Over Australia

photo credit:  Alex Cherney (Terrastro, TWAN)

APOD:

Why would the sky glow red? Aurora. Last week’s solar storms, emanating mostly from active sunspot region 1402, showered particles on the Earth that excited oxygen atoms high in the Earth’s atmosphere. As the excited element’s electrons fell back to their ground state, they emitted a red glow. Were oxygen atoms lower in Earth’s atmosphere excited, the glow would be predominantly green. Pictured above, this high red aurora is visible just above the horizon last week near Flinders, Victoria, Australia. The sky that night, however, also glowed with more familiar but more distant objects, including the central disk of our Milky Way Galaxy on the left, and the neighboring Large and Small Magellanic Cloud galaxies on the right. A time-lapse video highlighting auroras visible that night puts the picturesque scene in context. Why the sky did not also glow green remains unknown.

(via APOD: 2012 February 1 - Red Aurora Over Australia)

The Helix Nebula from the VISTA Telescope

image credit : ESO/VISTA/J. Emerson

APOD:

Will our Sun look like this one day? The Helix Nebula is one of brightest and closest examples of a planetary nebula, a gas cloud created at the end of the life of a Sun-like star. The outer gasses of the star expelled into space appear from our vantage point as if we are looking down a helix. The remnant central stellar core, destined to become a white dwarf star, glows in light so energetic it causes the previously expelled gas to fluoresce. The Helix Nebula, given a technical designation of NGC 7293, lies about 700 light-years away towards the constellation of the Water Bearer (Aquarius) and spans about 2.5 light-years. The above picture was taken three colors on infrared light by the 4.1-meter Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. A close-up of the inner edge of the Helix Nebula shows complex gas knots of unknown origin.

(via APOD: 2012 January 31 - The Helix Nebula from the VISTA Telescope)

Infrared Portrait of the Large Magellanic Cloud

image credit: ESA / NASA / JPL-Caltech / STScI

APOD:

Cosmic dust clouds ripple across this infrared portrait of our Milky Way’s satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. In fact, the remarkable composite image from the Herschel Space Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope show that dust clouds fill this neighboring dwarf galaxy, much like dust along the plane of the Milky Way itself. The dust temperatures tend to trace star forming activity. Spitzer data in blue hues indicate warm dust heated by young stars. Herschel’s instruments contributed the image data shown in red and green, revealing dust emission from cooler and intermediate regions where star formation is just beginning or has stopped. Dominated by dust emission, the Large Magellanic Cloud’s infrared appearance is different from views in optical images. But this galaxy’s well-known Tarantula Nebula still stands out, easily seen here as the brightest region to the left of center. A mere 160,000 light-years distant, the Large Cloud of Magellan is about 30,000 light-years across.

(via APOD: 2012 January 15 - Infrared Portrait of the Large Magellanic Cloud)

This is one of the better little planet projections I’ve seen.  :)

Little Planet Lovejoy

image credit:  Alex Cherney (Terrastro, TWAN)

APOD:

Once a bright apparition in the southern hemisphere dawn Comet Lovejoy is fading, but its long tail still stretches across skies near the south celestial pole. Captured on the morning of December 30th, the comet appears near edge of this little planet as well. Of course, the little planet is actually planet Earth and the image was created from a 12 frame mosaic used to construct a spherical panorama. The type of stereographic projection used to map the image pixels is centered directly below the camera and is known as the little planet projection. Stars surrounding this little planet were above the photographer’s cloudy horizon near the Bay of Islands on the Great Ocean Road in southern Victoria, Australia. Running alongside the Milky Way the comet can be identified, with other celestial highlights, by putting your cursor over the picture. Very bright stars Canopus and Sirius are right of the little planet.

(via APOD: 2012 January 11 - Little Planet Lovejoy)

NGC 6946, also known as the Fireworks Galaxy.

Facing NGC 6946

image credit:  Subaru Telescope (NAOJ) and Robert Gendler; Processing - Robert Gendler

APOD:

From our vantage point in the Milky Way Galaxy, we see NGC 6946 face-on. The big, beautiful spiral galaxy is located just 10 million light-years away, behind a veil of foreground dust and stars in the high and far-off constellation of Cepheus. From the core outward, the galaxy’s colors change from the yellowish light of old stars in the center to young blue star clusters and reddish star forming regions along the loose, fragmented spiral arms. NGC 6946 is also bright in infrared light and rich in gas and dust, exhibiting a high star birth and death rate. In fact, since the early 20th century at least nine supernovae, the death explosions of massive stars, were discovered in NGC 6946. Nearly 40,000 light-years across, NGC 6946 is also known as the Fireworks Galaxy. This remarkable portrait of NGC 6946 is a composite that includes image data from the 8.2 meter Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea.

(via APOD: 2012 January 9 - Facing NGC 6946)

A Full Sky Aurora Over Norway

photo credit:  Sebastian Voltmer

APOD:

Higher than the highest building, higher than the highest mountain, higher than the highest airplane, lies the realm of the aurora. Auroras rarely reach below 60 kilometers, and can range up to 1000 kilometers. Aurora light results from energetic electrons and protons striking molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere. Frequently, when viewed from space, a complete aurora will appear as a circle around one of the Earth’s magnetic poles. The above wide angle image, horizontally compressed, captured an unexpected auroral display that stretched across the sky one month ago over eastern Norway.

(via APOD: 2012 January 3 - A Full Sky Aurora Over Norway)

Red Moon Rising

photo credit:  Oshin Zakarian (TWAN)

APOD:

This surreal, wintry scene is a composite picture recorded on December 10 as the Moon rose behind the Zagros Mountains of Iran. A total lunar eclipse was already in progress. The image combines nearly 500 successive frames taken over 1.5 hours beginning in twilight as the eclipsed Moon steadily climbed above the rugged landscape. The reddened lunar disk and deep blue twilight make for a striking contrast, yet the contrasting colors have the same root cause. The eclipsed Moon is red because the Earth’s umbral shadow is suffused with a faint red light. The ruddy illumination is from all the reddened sunsets and sunrises, as seen from a lunar perspective. But the sunsets and sunrises are reddened because the Earth’s atmosphere scatters blue light more strongly than red, creating the twilight sky’s dim, blue glow.

(via APOD: 2011 December 16 - Red Moon Rising)