[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Adam Block, Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter, U. Arizona] In this image taken Jan. 23rd, [the arrow points to ] a new supernova, now cataloged as SN 2014J, in the nearby bright galaxy M82. Located near the Big Dipper in planet Earth’s sky, M82 is also known as the Cigar Galaxy…. […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Lorand Fenyes] M7 is one of the most prominent open clusters of stars on the sky. The cluster, dominated by bright blue stars, can be seen with the naked eye in a dark sky in the tail of the constellation of the Scorpion (Scorpius). M7 contains about 100 stars […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Jeff Husted] Blown by fast winds from a hot, massive star, this cosmic bubble is huge. Cataloged as Sharpless 2-308 it lies some 5,200 light-years away toward the constellation of the Big Dog (Canis Major) and covers slightly more of the sky than a Full Moon. … The massive […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / Rogelio Bernal Andreo] Otherwise known as the Belt of Orion, these three blue supergiant stars are hotter and much more massive than the Sun. They lie about 1,500 light-years away, born of Orion’s well-studied interstellar clouds. In fact, clouds of gas and dust adrift in this region have […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA, ESA; Processing: Judy Schmidt] What will survive this battle of the galaxies? Known as Seyfert’s Sextet, this intriguing group …. actually contains only four interacting galaxies. Near the center of this Hubble Space Telescope picture, the small face-on spiral galaxy lies in the distant background […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Hubble, NASA] Stars, like bees, swarm around the center of bright globular cluster M15. This ball of over 100,000 stars is a relic from the early years of our Galaxy, and continues to orbit the Milky Way’s center. M15, one of about 170 globular clusters remaining, is noted for […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] The bright core and outer reaches of giant elliptical galaxy M60 (NGC 4649) loom large at the upper left of this sharp close-up from the Hubble Space Telescope. Some 54 million light-years away and 120,000 light-years across, M60 is one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo Cluster. […]
A new image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows an enormous collection of galaxies and star clusters in stunning detail. Hubble spied 10,000 or so of the estimated 160,000 globular star groupings thought to reside in the huge galaxy cluster Abell 1689, which lies about 2.25 billion light-years away from Earth. For comparison, our own […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] The Andromeda Galaxy 2.5 million light years away is the most distant object easily seen by the unaided eye. Other apparent denizens of the night sky, stars, clusters, and nebulae, typically range from a few hundred to a few thousand light-years away and lie well within our own […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION]: Martin Pugh (Heaven’s Mirror Observatory) A careful look at this colorful cosmic snapshot reveals a surprising number of galaxies both near and far toward the constellation Ursa Major. The most striking is NGC 3718, the warped spiral galaxy near picture center. NGC 3718’s spiral arms look twisted and extended, […]
