SPACE!!!

~Happy anniversary to the James Webb Space Telescope~

Image Credit: SuperBIT, NASA

Alvin Wu’s Milky Way Ring

Youthful NGC 362 by europeanspaceagency

Credits: Jean-Charles Cuillandre, Hawaiian Starlight, CFHT

Credit: NASA, ESA, and Lotfi Ben-Jaffel (Institute of Astrophysics/University of Paris and University of Arizona).

Saturn - photos (polarised: false colour) respectively taken on the 19 of August 2012, and the 11 of March 2006. NASA.

Hubble Pinpoints Farthest Protocluster of Galaxies Ever Seen by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Young star offers a glimpse of the Sun’s past by europeanspaceagency

M24, Star Cloud Of Sagittarius

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Gravity s Grin : Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, published over 100 years ago, predicted the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. And that’s what gives these distant galaxies such a whimsical appearance, seen through the looking glass of X-ray and optical image data from the Chandra and Hubble space telescopes. Nicknamed the Cheshire Cat galaxy group, the group’s two large elliptical galaxies are suggestively framed by arcs. The arcs are optical images of distant background galaxies lensed by the foreground group’s total distribution of gravitational mass. Of course, that gravitational mass is dominated by dark matter. The two large elliptical “eye” galaxies represent the brightest members of their own galaxy groups which are merging. Their relative collisional speed of nearly 1,350 kilometers/second heats gas to millions of degrees producing the X-ray glow shown in purple hues. Curiouser about galaxy group mergers? The Cheshire Cat group grins in the constellation Ursa Major, some 4.6 billion light-years away. via NASA

A Deep Sky Behind an Eclipsed Moon : The plan was to capture a picturesque part of the sky that was hosting an unusual guest. The result included a bonus — an additional and unexpected guest. The beautiful background features part of the central band of our Milky Way galaxy on the far left, and the colorful clouds of Rho Ophiuchi in the image center. The unusual guest, a dimmed and reddened Moon on the right, was expected because the image was taken during last week’s total lunar eclipse. The timing had to be right because the Moon — both before and after eclipse — would be so bright it would overwhelm the background. The unexpected guest was the bright meteor across the image center. The fleeting meteor streak was captured on only one of the 10 consecutively-captured deep-field images from La Palma in the Spanish Canary Islands, while the eclipsed Moon image was taken immediately afterwards with the same camera and from the same location. The next total lunar eclipse — also quite expected — will occur in early November. via NASA