Love is certainly one of the main reasons: Couples have gazed at the stars above for countless generations. Like true love, the stars are beautiful and eternal, they are a powerful source of energy and light in an otherwise lonely existence, and their sparkle brings joy to our hearts. When we view the heavens above, we join with generations – past and future – that have gazed/will gaze upon the same heavenly view in awe and wonder.
If you’re an early bird, you can see the planets Mars and Jupiter in the eastern sky at sunrise this month! If you have a telescope, consider looking at Mars during the mornings of September 8 and 9 as the red planet moves through the famous “Beehive Cluster” of stars in Cancer. Both Mars and Jupiter will appear as bright points of light in the eastern sky before sunrise.
Mars and Jupiter are visible in the Name A Star Live constellations Cancer and Gemini, respectively. Just look east during the hours before sunrise and look for the two bright ‘stars’ over the horizon.
Here are some beautiful space photos and videos that have been posted on the Internet recently. Enjoy!
A beautiful star-forming region in a nearby galaxy!
The European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope has captured an intriguing star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud — one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies. This sharp image reveals two distinctive glowing clouds of gas: red-hued NGC 2014, and its blue neighbour NGC 2020. While they are very different, they were both sculpted by powerful stellar winds from extremely hot newborn stars that also radiate into the gas, causing it to glow brightly.
This light-year-long knot of interstellar gas and dust resembles a caterpillar on its way to a feast. But the meat of the story is not only what this cosmic caterpillar eats for lunch, but also what’s eating it. Harsh winds from extremely bright stars are blasting ultraviolet radiation at this “wanna-be” star and sculpting the gas and dust into its long shape.
Here are some beautiful space photos and videos that have been posted on the Internet recently. Enjoy!
This is onboard video of our latest mission, The Centennial Flight, that carried your star name into space June 21, 2013 from Spaceport America, New Mexico. It shows what it would be like to be on board the rocket, looking down as the rocket flies into space. Toward the end of the video you’ll see a note indicating “Apogee … 119 km.” That’s the point where the spacecraft reaches its maximum altitude (about 74 miles).
The beautiful, ringed planet Saturn rules the night sky this month in the Name A Star Live constellation Virgo. You can use the Moon to find this astronomical jewel, and use just about any telescope to see its rings! August also presents the best meteor shower of the year, the Perseid meteor shower. Read about this year’s Perseids in a separate blog post.
You can use the Moon the evening of August 12, 2013 to find the planet Saturn. If you’re in the northern hemisphere of Earth, just face west-southwest after sunset. Venus will be the very bright object over the western horizon.
The beautiful, ringed planet Saturn rules the night sky this month in the Name A Star Live constellation Virgo. You can use the Moon to find this astronomical jewel, and use just about any telescope to see its rings!
The Moon, Saturn and Spica the evening of July 16 as viewed from the northern hemisphere
Here are some beautiful space photos and videos that have been posted on the Internet recently. Enjoy!
The Butterfly Nebula
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team
The bright clusters and nebulae of planet Earth’s night sky are often named for flowers or insects. Though its wingspan covers over 3 light-years, NGC 6302 is no exception. With an estimated surface temperature of about 250,000 degrees C, the dying central star of this particular planetary nebula has become exceptionally hot, shining brightly in ultraviolet light but hidden from direct view by a dense torus of dust. This sharp and colorful close-up of the dying star’s nebula was recorded in 2009 by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3, installed during the final shuttle servicing mission. Cutting across a bright cavity of ionized gas, the dust torus surrounding the central star is near the center of this view, almost edge-on to the line-of-sight. Molecular hydrogen has been detected in the hot star’s dusty cosmic shroud. NGC 6302 lies about 4,000 light-years away in the arachnologically correct constellation of the Scorpion (Scorpius).
This July Fourth the solar system is showing off some fireworks of its own.
Superficially resembling a skyrocket, comet ISON is hurtling toward the sun presently at a whopping 48,000 mph (77,00 kph).
Its swift motion is captured in this time-lapse movie made from a sequence of pictures taken May 8, 2013, by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. At the time the images were taken, the comet was 403 million miles (649 million kilometers) from Earth, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
The movie shows a sequence of Hubble observations taken over a 43-minute span and compresses this into just five seconds. The comet travels 34,000 miles (55,000 kilometers) in this brief video, or 7 percent of the distance between Earth and the moon. The deep-space visitor streaks silently against the background stars.
Unlike a firework, the comet is not combusting, but in fact is pretty cold. Its skyrocket-looking tail is really a streamer of gas and dust bleeding off the icy nucleus, which is surrounded by a bright star-like-looking coma. The pressure of the solar wind sweeps the material into a tail, like a breeze blowing a windsock.
As the comet warms as it moves closer to the sun, its rate of sublimation (a process similar to evaporation in which solid matter transitions directly into gas) will increase. The comet will get brighter and its tail will grow longer. The comet is predicted to reach naked-eye visibility in November.
The comet is named after the organization that discovered it, the Russia-based International Scientific Optical Network.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc., in Washington, D.C.
The Ring Nebula
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI / AURA)- ESA /Hubble Collaboration
Except for the rings of Saturn, the Ring Nebula (M57) is probably the most famous celestial band. Its classic appearance is understood to be due to our own perspective, though. The recent mapping of the expanding nebula’s 3-D structure, based in part on this clear Hubble image, indicates that the nebula is a relatively dense, donut-like ring wrapped around the middle of a football-shaped cloud of glowing gas. The view from planet Earth looks down the long axis of the football, face-on to the ring. Of course, in this well-studied example of a planetary nebula, the glowing material does not come from planets. Instead, the gaseous shroud represents outer layers expelled from the dying, once sun-like star, now a tiny pinprick of light seen at the nebula’s center. Intense ultraviolet light from the hot central star ionizes atoms in the gas. In the picture, the blue color in the center is ionized helium, the cyan color of the inner ring is the glow of hydrogen and oxygen, and the reddish color of the outer ring is from nitrogen and sulfur. The Ring Nebula is about one light-year across and 2,000 light-years away.
“Existence A Time Lapse Project” Some beautiful imagery of the Milky Way as well as scenes from urban and remote locations.
Here are some beautiful space photos and videos that have been posted on the Internet recently. Enjoy!
Video of International Space Station commander Chris Hadfield singing David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ from the ISS.
An odd duck in the universe, NGC 4725 is a one-armed spiral galaxy. While most spiral galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have two or more spiral arms, NGC 4725 has only one. In this sharp color composite image, the solo spira mirabilis seems to wind from a prominent ring of bluish, newborn star clusters and red tinted star forming regions. The odd galaxy also sports obscuring dust lanes a yellowish central bar structure composed of an older population of stars. NGC 4725 is over 100 thousand light-years across and lies 41 million light-years away in the well-groomed constellation Coma Berenices. Computer simulations of the formation of single spiral arms suggest that they can be either leading or trailing arms with respect to a galaxy’s overall rotation. Also included in the frame, a more traditional looking spiral appears as a smaller background galaxy. Image Data: Subaru Telescope (NAOJ), Hubble Space Telescope. Additional Color Data: Adam Block, Bob Franke, Maurice Toet – Assembly and Processing: Robert Gendler
Video of the May 10 solar eclipse as viewed from Australia!
