Above, Saturn's moon, Helene. Nobody knows what causes the stretch marks, or why cratering is so slight. The moon is thought to be made of ice...a giant iceberg 30k across.
Not all spiral galaxies are perfect disks. Some are floppy like this one (above). Our own galaxy is slightly floppy, which supports speculation that we collided with another galaxy billions of years ago and are still in the process of settling down.
Above, a back lit photo of Enceladus, another moon of Saturn. Like Europa this is thought to contain a substantial underground ocean of liquid water.
This (above) is one of the clearest views yet of the Orion Nebula.
Above, the core of a dense star cluster way out near the rim of our own galaxy. Stars are incredibly close here and, with every star churning out solar ejecta, the area is probably radioactive beyond anything we could imagine.
Here's (above) two galaxies colliding, along with the resulting shock waves. We're seeing the collision from the back of the foreground galaxy. The galaxy that's hitting it is behind the one we can see, but we can see a glimmer of it in the form of a blue rim light
As the title says, this (above) is a film which zooms into the center of our galaxy and reveals the supermassive black hole there. It's a montage of pictures shot on optical and infra red wavelengths. What makes this special is that it includes a picture of the central black hole. Well sort of...it's actually a picture of a newly discovered gas cloud surrounding the black hole.
Nifty, huh?
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ReplyDeleteI'm not really knowledgeable on astronomy, so I don't have as much to say on these posts, but I'm astonished by the high quality of these latest photos. Just goes to show you that there is so much to be learned even when we think we know it all.
ReplyDeleteI found this really interesting YouTube channel run by a man named LogicJunkie the other day and he reminded me of you in terms of how you love to come up with theories to explain things. Check it out. He's a Duke University graduate that literally got screwed over by the university because they stole all his grant money and he received an abysmal education there, which he talks about in depth in "My Long and Private Nightmare" in the second link.
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheLogicJunkie/videos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtaaflNiqrg
I bought my telescope after the '94 Northridge Earthquake.That 4 am 6.8 quake knocked out almost all outdoor lights in Southern California for a couple of wonderful hours.
ReplyDeleteWhen everything finally seemed to stop shaking I went out on the deck of the place I was renting in the Hollywood HIlls and was astonished by the incredible sight of a night sky not hidden by light pollution. Many callers to 911 thought the Milky Way was a cloud of toxic smoke.