Special to CosmicTribune.com, September 11, 2023 Excerpts from weekly Sky&Telescope report. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 11 ■ You can see in the stars that the season is changing: We’ve reached the time of year when, just as the stars come out, Cassiopeia has climbed as high in the northeast as the Big Dipper has sunk in the northwest. Cas stands […]
Special to CosmicTribune.com, July 17, 2023 Excerpts from weekly Sky&Telescope report. SUNDAY, JULY 16 ■ The tail of Scorpius is low due south after dark, to the lower right of the Sagittarius Teapot. Look for the two stars especially close together in Scorpius’s tail. These are Lambda and fainter Upsilon Scorpii, known as the Cat’s Eyes. […]
Analysis by CosmicTribune.com, July 21, 2022 What are we to make of the new images ostensibly from the James Webb Space Telescope? “These aren’t photographs. They are data visualizations!” noted Tim Fernholz in a report for Quartz. So are we to take these spectacular presentations on faith and the word of the Biden White House […]
March 12, 2017 [CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Christoph Kaltseis, CEDIC 2017] Near the center of this sharp cosmic portrait, at the heart of the Orion Nebula, are four hot, massive stars known as the Trapezium. Tightly gathered within a region about 1.5 light-years in radius, they dominate the core of the dense Orion […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) While drifting through the cosmos, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud became sculpted by stellar winds and radiation to assume a recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is embedded in the vast and complex Orion Nebula (M42). A potentially rewarding […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Mads Fredslund Andersen, Stellar Astrophysics Centre, Aarhus Univ., Denmark] Near first quarter, the Moon in March lights this snowy, rugged landscape, a view across the top of Tenerife toward La Palma in the Canary Islands Spanish archipelago. The large Teide volcano, the highest point in Spain, looms over the […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Bob Franke] Comet C/2014 S2 (PanSTARRS) poses for a Messier moment in this telescopic snapshot from April 18. In fact it shares the 1.5 degree wide field-of-view with two well-known entries in the 18th century comet-hunting astronomer’s famous catalog. Outward bound and sweeping through northern skies just below the […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Ivo Scheggia] A few days ago, a bright fireball was photographed from the Alps mountain range in Switzerland as it blazed across the sky. The fireball, likely from the Taurids meteor shower, was notable not only for how bright it was, but for the rare orange light it created […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Jimmy Walker] A star cluster around 2 million years young surrounded by natal clouds of dust and glowing gas, M16 is also known as The Eagle Nebula. This beautifully detailed image of the region includes cosmic sculptures made famous in Hubble Space Telescope close-ups of the starforming complex. Described […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Giuseppe Carmine Iaffaldano; Processing: Roberto Colombari] Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud by chance has assumed this recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is some 1,500 light-years distant, embedded in the vast Orion cloud complex. About five light-years “tall”, the dark cloud […]