Eclecticus

lori-rocks:

Lunar Eclipse
by Vadim Dmitriyev

cwnl:

Celestial Footprints: Star trails around the south celestial pole

By pointing a camera towards the south (or to the north in the northern hemisphere) at night, we can record the paths of stars which never set. They appear to circle the apparent position of the Earth’s axis of rotation projected on the sky. The elevation of this position above the local horizon indicates our local geographical latitude, about 30 degrees south at Siding Spring. The angle swept out by the arcs is an indication of the exposure time, which in this case was about 10.5 hours on 400 ISO colour film, using a Hasselblad camera which has a square format, seen in full here. This kind of long exposure is only possible from an extremely dark site such as Siding Spring Observatory, which is the location of the Anglo-Australian Telescope, whose building dominates the foreground.

Credit: AAO

lori-rocks:

Namibian Heavens
by Christopher Gray

unknownskywalker:

Starry-Eyed Hubble Celebrates 20 Years of Awe and Discovery

This brand new Hubble image captured by the Wide Field Camera 3 on Feb. 1-2, 2010, shows the chaotic activity atop a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas and dust that is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks.

This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina. The image celebrates the 20th anniversary of Hubble’s launch and deployment into an orbit around Earth.

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 ionized 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 are fledgling stars. Long streamers of gas can be seen shooting in opposite directions off 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 are the signpost for new star birth. The jets are launched by swirling disks around the young stars, which allow material to slowly accrete onto the stars’ surfaces.

The colors in this composite image correspond to the glow of oxygen (blue), hydrogen and nitrogen (green), and sulfur (red).

[Click image to see in high resolution. Or download the large file. Also available: a zoomed-out version and it’s larger file.]

Source: NASA, ESA, HubbleSite

black-and-white:

tapwaterjackson:

Saturn and Rhea, National Geographic Top Ten Space Pictures 2009 Slideshow

iheartar:

The colliding Antenna Galaxies.

The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide in a similar fashion in 2.5 billion years.