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Feel free to post space images here you find interesting, spectacular, or just plain awesome.
This spectacular image of the large spiral galaxy NGC 1232 was obtained on September 21, 1998 by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope located in Paranal, Chile.
It is based on three exposures in ultra-violet, blue and red light, respectively. The colours of the different regions are well visible: the central areas contain older stars of reddish color, while the spiral arms are populated by young, blue stars and many star-forming regions. Note the distorted companion galaxy on the left side of the picture, shaped like the greek letter "theta".
NGC 1232 is located 20-degrees south of the celestial equator, in the constellation Eridanus (The River). The distance is about 100 million light-years, but the excellent optical quality of the Very Large Telescope and its Focal Reducer and Spectrograph (FORS) allows us to see an incredible wealth of details. This was the first light image for the VLT with the FORS activated. The galaxy is about twice the size of the Milky Way galaxy.
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More than a trillion stars reside in this somewhat spherical galaxy, named M87.
The galaxy is part of the relatively nearby Virgo cluster of galaxies, about 60 million light-years from our own Milky Way. M87 looks nothing like the Milky Way.
M87 is known technically as an elliptical galaxy, and it's a strange one. It contains an unusually high number of globular clusters, groupings of ancient stars that are often leftovers from the very early years of the universe and which served as galactic building blocks.
While the Milky Way harbors about 200 globular clusters, some 14,000 of them populate M87.
The image was obtained by Jean-Charles Cuillandre using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
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One of the last images of a full Saturn, taken by the Cassini-Huygens mission before the ringed world became too close and too large to fit in the spacecraft's image viewer. The high clouds of Saturn's bright equatorial band appear to stretch like cotton candy in this image taken by the Cassini narrow angle camera on May 11, 2004. The icy moon Enceladus (499 kilometers, or 310 miles across) is faintly visible below and to the right of the South Pole. The image was taken from a distance of 16.3 million miles (26.3 million kilometers) from Saturn through a filter centered at 727 nanometers. The image scale is 97 miles (156 kilometers) per pixel. No contrast enhancement has been performed on this image.
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From the International Space Station, astronaut Don Pettit got a unique view of colorful auroras that sometimes dance above Earth's polar regions. Auroras occur when elevated solar activity accelerates tiny, charged particles to race along Earth's magnetic field lines toward the poles. These particles excite molecules in the upper atmosphere, causing them to glow.
From Earth's surface, people at high latitudes sometimes witness the aurora from below. Pettit, the science officer for Expedition Six, got an edge-on view of the undulating, ephemeral phenomena, allowing him to estimate how high they go.
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This magnificent erupting prominence was captured by the EIT on Sept. 14, 1999. It shows emission from ionized helium at about 108,000 degrees Fahrenheit (60,000 degrees C).
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This EIT image shows emission from ionized iron at about 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit (1 million degrees C), revealing diffuse corona -- the solar atmosphere -- and magnetic loops on July 1, 1999. Light-colored areas are active regions where pent-up magnetic energy could burst out at any moment.
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The "Bastille Day" flare on July 14, 2000 came amid the peak of activity in the current 11-year solar cycle, and it generated a space storm that disrupted satellite and surface communications at Earth. This EIT image of the flare -- the white eruption just above the center of the Sun -- shows emission from ionized iron at about 2.7 million degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 million degrees C).
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This remnant of a supernova explosion is about 6,000 light-years away. It contains a neutron star near its center that spins 30 times per second. Green light is mostly hydrogen. Blue is electrons moving at significant fractions of light-speed.
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The Dumbbell Nebula is about 1,200 light-years away. It's packed with rarified gas ejected by the hot central star (visible on this photo). The gas is now lit by intense ultraviolet radiation from this star.
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The galaxy Messier 83 is located in the southern constellation Hydra (The Water-Snake) and is also known as NGC 5236. It is about 15 million light-years away. The spiral structure resembles that of the Milky Way Galaxy in which we live, but Messier 83 also possesses a bar-like structure at the center.
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Two opposite jets from a developing star ram into interstellar matter about 1,500 light-years away in Orion, a region of intense star formation. The enigmatic "waterfall" to the upper left is unexplained.
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Bright enough to be seen with the naked eye to keen observers, the Orion nebula is a few tens of light-years' wide complex of gas and dust, illuminated by several massive and hot stars at its core, the famous Trapezium stars.
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This binary star system called AB7 packs a punch. A combined "wind" of charged particles is perhaps a billion times more powerful than what our Sun produces. The wind pressurizes interstellar gas to create the bubble shape.
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The Sombrero galaxy, with its massive bulge, is probably younger than some; having not developed the graceful spiral arms seen in others. The galaxy is edge-on to our view, accentuating the visual effect of the bulge.
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The center of our Milky Way galaxy is located in the southern constellation Sagittarius (The Archer) and is 26,000 light-years away. Thousands of stars huddle within the central, one light-year wide region. Inside lurks a black hole that's as massive as 4 million Suns.
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A collision of two galaxies has left a merged star system with an unusual appearance as well as bizarre internal motions. Messier 64 (M64) has a spectacular dark band of absorbing dust in front of the galaxy's bright nucleus, giving rise to its nicknames of the "Black Eye" or "Evil Eye" galaxy.
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NASA's Polar spacecraft saw both the aurora borealis and aurora australis expanding and brightening around midnight ET on July 27. The display was created by a mid-sized coronal mass ejection (CME) that shot out from the Sun on July 25. Intense coronal holes on the solar surface also contributed to the influx of charged particles that interacted with Earth's protective magnetic field and atmosphere.
The aurora, also known as the Northern and Southern Lights, form when solar particles and magnetic fields pump energy into the Earth's magnetic field, accelerating electrically charged particles trapped within. The high-speed particles crash into Earth's upper atmosphere (ionosphere) over the polar regions, causing the atmosphere to emit a ghostly, multicolored glow.
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That's pretty cool, I've never seen them depicted from space before. I was up at my aunt's cabin a couple of weeks ago (Lake of the Woods, MN) and sat out for about two hours and watched the most awesome show of Northern lights I've ever seen. They don't get extremely colorful here, but they are amazing nonetheless. Basically enormous waves of light with flashes of color travelling from one side of the sky to the other.
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A mosaic of true-colour land images taken by the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument on board ESA’s Envisat environmental satellite. The image is a composite of 85 reduced and full resolution images acquired by MERIS in the summer of 2002, using three out of 15 MERIS spectral bands, taken from Envisat in polar orbit at an altitude of 800 km.
Credits: ESA 2003
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