The First Star

Filaments of glowing gas are abundantly present in this nebula known as The Medusa Nebula, or Abell 21. It is an old planetary nebula some 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Gemini and like its mythological namesake, the nebula is associated with a dramatic transformation. The planetary nebula phase represents a final stage in the evolution of low mass stars like the sun as they transform themselves from red giants to hot white dwarf stars and in the process shed off their outer layers. Ultraviolet radiation from the hot star powers the nebular glow. The Medusa's transforming star is the faint one near the center of the overall bright crescent shape. In this deep telescopic view, fainter filaments clearly extend below and right of the bright crescent region. The Medusa Nebula is estimated to be over 4 light-years across.

Image Credit & Copyright: Martin Bradley Chesterfield Astronomical Society

Known for its iconic blue stars, the Pleiades is shown here in infrared light where the surrounding dust outshines the stars. Three infrared colours have been mapped into visual colours. The base images were taken by NASA's orbiting Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft. Cataloged as M45 and nicknamed the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades star cluster is situated in a passing dust cloud. The light and winds from the massive Pleiades stars preferentially repel smaller dust particles, causing the dust to become stratified into filaments, as seen.

Image Credit: NASA, WISE, IRSA, Processing & Copyright : Francesco Antonucci

Happy Valentine’s Day!!!

Another year means it’s time for me favourite post!!! Here’s another round of science themed valentines to send to allllll of the people you love in your life!

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🖤🤍🤎❤️‍🔥💕❣️💞💝💘💖💗💓

I love you all!!!!

Earth's Moon, Luna, doesn't naturally show this rich texture, and its colors are more subtle. But this digital creation is based on reality. This image is a composite of multiple images and enhanced to bring up real surface features. The enhancements, for example, show more clearly craters that illustrate the bombardment our Moon has been through during its 4.6-billion-year history. The dark areas, called maria, have fewer craters and were once seas of molten lava. Additionally, the image colors, although based on fact, are changed and exaggerated. Here, a blue hue indicates a region that is iron rich, while orange indicates a slight excess of aluminum.

Image Credit & Copyright: Darya Kawa Mirza

HAPPY NEW YEAR!! I sincerely hope 2023 brings some extreme happiness, success and love to every one of you. Here’s to more amazing pictures of our universe this year 🥂

Mars’ bright yellowish hue dominates this starry field of view that includes Taurus' alpha star Aldebaran and the Hyades and Pleiades star clusters. While red giant Aldebaran appears to anchor the V-shape of the Hyades at the left of the frame, Aldebaran is not a member of the Hyades star cluster. The Hyades cluster is 151 light-years away making it the nearest established open star cluster, but Aldebaran lies at less than half that distance, along the same line-of-sight. At the right, some 400 light-years distant is the open star cluster cataloged as Messier 45, also known as the Pleiades or Seven Sisters. In Greek myth, the Pleiades were daughters of the astronomical titan Atlas and sea-nymph Pleione.

Image Credit & Copyright: Gabor Balazs

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates! 🎄🎅🏻

Barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 is truly a majestic island universe. 200,000 light-years across and located 60 million light-years away toward the constellation Fornax, NGC 1365 is a dominant member of the well-studied Fornax Cluster of galaxies. This impressively sharp color image shows the intense, reddish star forming regions near the ends of the galaxy's central bar and along its spiral arms. Seen in fine detail, obscuring dust lanes cut across the galaxy's bright core. At the core lies a supermassive black hole. Astronomers think NGC 1365's prominent bar plays a crucial role in the galaxy's evolution, drawing gas and dust into a star-forming maelstrom and ultimately feeding material into the central black hole.

Image Credit & Copyright: Martin Pugh

Happy Solstice!

Today is the December solstice, marking an astronomical beginning of summer in the southern hemisphere and winter in the north. This view from Ostersund in central Sweden, features the midday Sun just above the horizon with a beautiful solar ice halo. Naturally occurring atmospheric ice crystals can produce the halos, refracting and reflecting the sunlight.

Image Credit & Copyright: Goran Strand

Popularly called Thor's Helmet, NGC 2359 is a hat-shaped cosmic cloud with wing-like appendages and is about 30 light-years across. It’s actually more like an interstellar bubble, blown with a fast wind from the bright, massive star near the bubble's center. Known as a Wolf-Rayet star, the central star is an extremely hot giant thought to be in a brief, pre-supernova stage of evolution. NGC 2359 is located about 15,000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Great Overdog. This image is a mixed cocktail of data from narrowband filters, capturing not only natural looking stars but details of the nebula's filamentary structures. The star in the center of Thor's Helmet is expected to explode in a spectacular supernova sometime within the next few thousand years.

Image Credit & Copyright: Hannah Rochford

Showing in infrared wavelengths, this merging galaxy pair is about 500 million light-years away toward the constellation Delphinus. The galaxy merger spans about 100,000 light-years in this deep James Webb Space Telescope image. The image data is from Webb's Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) and Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI). Their combined, sharp infrared view follows galactic scale restructuring in the dusty merger's wild jumble of intense star forming regions and distorted spiral arms

Image Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, L. Armus, A. Evans

The meteor shower depicted in this photo the 2022 Leonids which peaked in early November, and the view is from Hainan, China looking out over the South China Sea. Meteor streaks captured over a few hours were isolated and added to a foreground image recorded earlier. From this place and time, Leonid meteors that trace back to the constellation of Leo were seen streaking across other constellations including Orion. The bright red planet Mars appears near the top of the image.

The best way to watch a meteor shower is to find a comfy place that you can monitor a large area of the night sky!

Image Credit & Copyright: Luo Hongyang

Bright stars and interesting molecules are forming and being liberated in the Statue of Liberty nebula. The complex nebula resides in the star forming region called RCW 57, and besides the iconic monument, to some it looks like a flying superhero or a weeping angel. By digitally removing the stars, this re-assigned color image showcases dense knots of dark interstellar dust, fields of glowing hydrogen gas ionized by these stars, and great loops of gas expelled by dying stars. A detailed study of NGC 3576 showed at least 33 massive stars in the end stages of formation, and the clear presence of the complex carbon molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). PAHs are thought to be created in the cooling gas of star forming regions, and their development in the Sun's formation nebula five billion years ago may have been an important step in the development of life on Earth.

Image Credit & Copyright: Chris Willocks

The Cartwheel galaxy, along with the two galaxies on the left, are part of a group of galaxies about 500 million light years away in the constellation Sculptor. The large galaxy's rim spans over 100,000 light years and is composed of star forming regions filled with extremely bright and massive stars. The Cartwheel's ring-like shape is the result of gravitational disruption caused by a smaller galaxy passing through a large one, compressing the interstellar gas and dust and causing a star formation wave to move out like a ripple across the surface of a pond.

The featured recent image of the Cartwheel Galaxy by the Webb Space Telescope reveals new details not only about where stars are forming, but also about activity near the galaxy's central black hole.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

Pictured, behind this darker cloud, is a pileus iridescent cloud, a group of water droplets that have a uniformly similar size and so together diffract different colors of sunlight by different amounts. The featured image was taken last month in Pu'er, Yunnan Province, China. Also captured were unusual cloud ripples above the pileus cloud. The formation of a rare pileus cloud capping a common cumulus cloud is an indication that the lower cloud is expanding upward and might well develop into a storm.

Image Credit & Copyright: Jiaqi Sun （孙嘉琪）

IM BACK ✨✨✨ sorry for being MIA lately, life has been insane!

BUT I’m back and promise to post more!! Let’s start off September with this beauty shot from the beginning of this year's Perseid Meteor Shower. The picturesque foreground is the rocky beach of the Mediterranean Sea in Le Dramont, France. All of the frames for this seemingly surreal nightscape were acquired within 15 minutes.

Image Credit & Copyright: Julien Looten

Magnificent spiral galaxy NGC 4565, also known as the Needle Galaxy, is viewed edge-on from Earth. This sharp, colorful image reveals the galaxy's boxy, bulging central core, obscured by dust lanes. NGC 4565 itself lies about 40 million light-years from Earth and spans about 100,000 light-years. Easily spotted with small telescopes, sky enthusiasts consider NGC 4565 to be a prominent celestial masterpiece Messier missed.

Image Credit & Copyright: Michael Sherick

A beautiful emission nebula and star cluster can be found far in the southern skies within the constellation Carina. Stars from NGC 3572 are toward top center in the telescopic frame that would measure about 100 light-years across, while the cluster's estimated distance is 9,000 light-years. The visible interstellar gas and dust is part of the star cluster's natal molecular cloud. Dense streams of material within the nebula, eroded by stellar winds and radiation, trail away from the energetic young stars. They are likely sites of ongoing star formation. In the coming tens to hundreds of millions of years, gas and stars in the cluster will be dispersed by gravitational tides and by violent supernova explosions that end the short lives of the massive cluster stars.

Image Credit & Copyright: Carlos Taylor

Known as N11, this region is visible on the upper right of many images of its home galaxy, the Milky Way neighbor known as the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The featured image was taken for scientific purposes by the Hubble Space Telescope and reprocessed for artistry. Although the section imaged above is known as NGC 1763, the entire N11 emission nebula is second largest in LMC, only behind the Tarantula Nebula. Dark dust is home to emerging young stars, which are also visible around the image.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA; Processing: Josh Lake

The featured wide-angle mosaic was taken over the steppe golden fields in Portugal in 2020. From such a dark location, an immediately-evident breathtaking glow arched over the night sky: the central band of our Milky Way galaxy. But this sky had much more. Thin clouds crossed the sky like golden ribbons. The planet Mars appeared on the far left, while the planets Saturn and Jupiter were also simultaneously visible -- but on the opposite side of the sky, here seen on the far right. Near the top of the image the bright star Vega can be found, while the distant and faint Andromeda Galaxy can be seen toward the left, just below Milky Way's arch.

Image Credit & Copyright: Miguel Claro (TWAN, Dark Sky Alqueva)

Colourful auroras erupted unexpectedly a few years ago, with green aurora appearing near the horizon and brilliant bands of red aurora high overhead. The Moon lit the foreground of this scene, while familiar stars could be seen in the distance. The astrophotographer shot this image mosaic in the field of White Dome Geyser in Yellowstone National Park in the western USA. Sure enough, just after midnight, the geyser erupted -- spraying a stream of water and vapor many meters into the air. Geyser water is heated to steam by scalding magma several kilometers below, and rises through rock cracks to the surface. About half of all known geysers occur in Yellowstone National Park.

Image Credit & Copyright: Robert Howell