Common Themes

This lovely image of the Lagoon Nebula was an October feature on APOD. I love the mixture of colors, the copper and green!

The center of the Lagoon Nebula is a whirlwind of spectacular star formation. Visible on the upper left, at least two long funnel-shaped clouds, each roughly half a light-year long, have been formed by extreme stellar winds and intense energetic starlight. The tremendously bright nearby star, Hershel 36, lights the area. Vast walls of dust hide and redden other hot young stars. As energy from these stars pours into the cool dust and gas, large temperature differences in adjoining regions can be created generating shearing winds which may cause the funnels. This picture, spanning about 5 light years, was taken in 1995 by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. The Lagoon Nebula, also known as M8, lies about 5000 light years distant toward the constellation of Sagittarius.

A farewell shot by Voyager 2, the above image of Uranus hails from January 25, 1986, at a range of 600,000 miles. (Here’s a bit more info for those so inclined.)

This extraordinary image was taken in 1966 by Lunar Orbiter 1, and is the first image of the Earth from the Moon. The image was recently released at a higher quality than ever before, due to a restoration project twenty years in the making. (You can download the “small” high-res version here; small = over 3000 pixels wide.)

Below, a detail shot at near-full resolution, showing some of the textures captured way back when:

This image appeared on APOD this summer. You’ve probably seen the Eagle Nebula before, as popularized through Hubble’s colorful detail shots of the “Pillars of Creation” formations.

Young star cluster M16 is surrounded by natal clouds of cosmic dust and glowing gas also known as The Eagle Nebula. This beautifully detailed image of the region includes fantastic shapes made famous in well-known Hubble Space Telescope close-ups of the starforming complex. Described as elephant trunks or Pillars of Creation, dense, dusty columns rising near the center are light-years in length but are gravitationally contracting to form stars. Energetic radiation from the cluster stars erodes material near the tips, eventually exposing the embedded new stars. Extending from the upper left edge of the nebula is another dusty starforming column known as the Fairy of Eagle Nebula. M16 and the Eagle Nebula lie about 7,000 light-years away, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake).

A riveting backlit image of Saturn, as captured by Cassini in 2006. This is one of the most spectacular photos I’ve seen, period, and it’s worth bringing back out two years later!

Oh, and see this?

That’s us, that’s Earth. Neat, huh?