Better Late Than Never!

NASA released the clearest images of Neptune’s rings in over 30 years.

Mount Yerupaja under the stars, Cordillera Huayhuash, Peru

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The Hubble Space telescope just sent back a new photo of the Twin Jet Nebula. Here’s what it looked like in 1997:

And now …

Whoa. But wait, we also got an updated image of the merging galaxies NGC 6240. What it looked like in 2008:

And today:

Science, you’re the best. Oh, and the explanation behind those merging galaxies and their black holes is wild.

In Another World.

Making a Spectacle of Star Formation in Orion

Looking like a pair of eyeglasses only a rock star would wear, this nebula brings into focus a murky region of star formation. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope exposes the depths of this dusty nebula with its infrared vision, showing stellar infants that are lost behind dark clouds when viewed in visible light.

Best known as Messier 78, the two round greenish nebulae are actually cavities carved out of the surrounding dark dust clouds. The extended dust is mostly dark, even to Spitzer’s view, but the edges show up in mid-wavelength infrared light as glowing, red frames surrounding the bright interiors. Messier 78 is easily seen in small telescopes in the constellation of Orion, just to the northeast of Orion’s belt, but looks strikingly different, with dominant, dark swaths of dust. Spitzer’s infrared eyes penetrate this dust, revealing the glowing interior of the nebulae.

Credit: NASA/JPL/Spitzer

NGC 6514, Trifid’s Unicorn

NGC 1999

Just south of the Orion nebula is a dense area of dust and gas forming stars, in fact, the first Herbig-Haro stars were located here, protostars pushing intense beams of matter out at the poles.

The mystery is the black blob in the white region, a reflective nebula from the star V380 Ori, but what is the dark patch ?

Originally it was thought to be a dense dark cloud of dust, hiding the light, however further analysis has found it is indeed a hole, made to look black in contrast to the bright reflective surroundings.

Massive cluster of galaxies: MACS J0416

The #HubbleTelescope captured these auroras on #jupiter caused by light waves interacting with the planet’s magnetic fields.