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The Horsehead Nebula Like You’ve Never Seen It Before
New Hubble infrared image of the Horsehead nebula region. Click for a larger version.
Holy Horsehead, Batman! You’ve probably seen photos of the famous Horsehead nebula in Orion many times before, but NOTHING like this!
Astronomers have used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to photograph the iconic Horsehead Nebula in a new, infrared light to mark the 23rd anniversary of the famous observatory’s launch aboard the space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990.
Looking like an apparition rising from whitecaps of interstellar foam, the iconic Horsehead Nebula has graced astronomy books ever since its discovery more than a century ago. The nebula is a favorite target for amateur and professional astronomers. It is shadowy in optical light. It appears transparent and ethereal when seen at infrared wavelengths. The rich tapestry of the Horsehead Nebula pops out against the backdrop of Milky Way stars and distant galaxies that easily are visible in infrared light.
The nebula is part of the Orion Molecular Cloud, located about 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Orion. It is one of the nearest and most easily-photographed regions in which massive stars are being formed.
A Clear Blue Sky on Mars
An Earthlike view of the 18,000-foot-high Mount Sharp (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
There’s nothing like a beautiful sunny day in Gale crater! The rusty sand crunching beneath your wheels, a gentle breeze blowing at a balmy 6º C (43º F), Mount Sharp rising in the distance into a clear blue sky… wait, did I just say blue sky?
Yes I did. But no worries — Mars hasn’t sprouted a nitrogen-and-oxygen atmosphere overnight. The image above is a crop from a panorama made of images from NASA’s Curiosity rover showing Gale crater’s central peak, Mount Sharp (officially Aeolis Mons.) Don’t let the blue sky fool you though — the lighting has been purposely adjusted to look like a sunlit scene on Earth… if only to let geologists more easily refer to their own experience when studying the Martian landscape.
A Comet and the Crescent Moon
Comet Pan-STARRS seen from Alaska on 12 March 2013 © Travis A. Rector
As comet Pan-STARRS heads back out into the depths of the Solar System, it’s become visible to skywatchers in the northern hemisphere (after several weeks of putting on a show in southern skies.) While poor viewing due to weather confounded some over the past few days, many people did get some great views of this cosmic visitor — such as the image above, captured on the night of March 12 by Dr. Travis A. Rector from the Menaker Observatory in Anchorage, Alaska.
“Comet Pan-STARRS is the very faint dot just below the center of the image,” Dr. Rector wrote on his website. “Its tail is pointed towards the upper-left corner. This picture was taken on its greatest elongation from the Sun. Nonetheless it was very hard to see. And nearly impossible to see by the naked eye.”
See a couple more images of Pan-STARRS below:
The Colors of Saturn’s Northern Skies
Color-composite of Cassini images acquired on 27 Feb. 2013 (NASA/JPL/SSI/J. Major)
Bored by blue? Saturn’s skies sure do have a lot more colors, as seen here in a color-somposite made from raw Cassini images acquired on Feb. 27, 2013.
With spring progressing on Saturn’s northern hemisphere (a season that takes 7 1/2 Earth years to pass!) the upper latitudes gradually receive more sunlight and thus more solar energy, warming the planet’s atmosphere and driving the upper-level winds and storms.
Saturn’s Stunning, Swirling Cyclone
Saturn’s north polar cyclone (NASA/JPL/SSI)
Oh man. It’s stuff like this that got me into space blogging in the first place.
Landing here on Earth last night, this is one of several new raw images from Cassini acquired yesterday (Nov. 27) showing the enormous cyclone of clouds swirling around Saturn’s geographic north pole. The angle of sunlight highlights the multilayered structure of the cyclone and surrounding cloud bands wonderfully… this is a roiling feature approximately 3-4,000 km across and in places appears to carve cloud channels hundreds of kilometers into Saturn’s atmosphere. Simply. Beautiful.
It’s been a while since we’ve gotten such a good look at Saturn’s north pole… over four years ago, I’d say, and in fact one of my very first blog posts here on LITD was of the hexagonal feature ringing Saturn’s northern hemisphere. Thanks to Cassini’s new orbital trajectory, which is taking it high over the ring plane and poles of Saturn, we have the opportunity to view the gas giant’s upper latitudes again.
In fact we even have a brand new look at the hexagon, which is still there, four years later:
A Backyard View of a Solar Prominence
Hydrogen-alpha photo of the Sun by Alan Friedman
An enormous tree-shaped prominence spreads its “branches” tens of thousands of miles above the Sun’s photosphere in this image, a section of a photo acquired in hydrogen alpha (Ha) by Alan Friedman last week from his backyard in Buffalo, NY. Writes Alan on his blog, “gotta love a sunny day in November!”
Check out the full image — along with an idea of just how big this “tree” actually is — here.
A Daytime Moon on Mars
Phobos seen during the Martian day (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
A raw image taken on September 21 by Curiosity’s right Mastcam shows a daytime view of the Martian sky with a crescent-lit Phobos in the frame… barely visible, yes, but most certainly there. Very cool!
The image above is a crop of the original, contrast-enhanced and sharpened to bring out as much detail as possible.
