Wired Space Photo of the Day

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by Wired Science Staff @ Wired Space Photo of the Day | Wired Science | Wired.com

This glowing region reveals arcs and bubbles formed when stellar winds - streams of charged particles ejected by the Trapezium stars - collide with material.

 

[longknife]

Space Photo of the Day: Collection of Mercury Craters

Wired Science » Miscellaneous|Wired Science Staff @ Wired Space Photo of the Day | Wired Science | Wired.com

 

[Hicup]

God I would LOVE to live on a planet that had a view like this. Every day would be absolutely breathtaking.

And there would be no night. Everyday would literally be everyday.

Beautiful!


Tim-

 

[longknife]

Vortex of Color

by Wired Science Staff
This spectacular, vertigo inducing, false-color image from NASA's Cassini mission highlights the storms at Saturn's north pole. The angry eye of a hurricane-like storm appears dark red while the fast-moving hexagonal jet stream framing it is a yellowish green. Low-lying ...more @ Wired Space Photo of the Day | Wired Science | Wired.com

 

[MoSurveyor]

Vortex of Color

by Wired Science Staff

I like your pics but I have to correct this one ...

Starburst Jewel

Like a July 4 fireworks display, a young, glittering collection of stars looks like an aerial burst. The cluster is surrounded by clouds of interstellar gas and dust—the raw material for new star formation. The nebula, located 20,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina, contains a central cluster of huge, hot stars, called NGC 3603. This environment is not as peaceful as it looks. Ultraviolet radiation and violent stellar winds have blown out an enormous cavity in the gas and dust enveloping the cluster, providing an unobstructed view of the cluster.

Wired Space Photo of the Day | Wired Science | Wired.com

 

[longknife]

Oops - let's try that caption again ...

Thanks I had 2 to post and somehow got them mixed up!

 

[longknife]

Wired Staff 01.01.13 @ Wired Space Photo of the Day | Wired Science | Wired.com

Anarchy in Space

The Danish 1.54-metre telescope located at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile has captured a striking image of NGC 6559, an object that showcases the anarchy that reigns when stars form inside an interstellar cloud. This region of sky includes glowing red clouds of mostly hydrogen gas, blue regions where starlight is being reflected from tiny particles of dust and also dark regions where the dust is thick and opaque.

 

[longknife]

Galaxy, Straight Ahead

Here is a picture of the very thin disk ("line") of NGC 891.

This image was acquired using the Schulman 0.8m telescope. As is often the case, the famous targets must be re-acquired using the best equipment one has at hand and this image is a re-rendering for this ultra famous galaxy at the SkyCenter. The data was taken in the Fall of 2012 and in the Spring of 2013 during for image processing.

 

[longknife]

Close-Up Mars Skin

Polygons are of great interest because they often indicate the presence of shallow ice or of desiccation such as in a mud flat. However, nature sometimes seems too clever for us.

Polygons form by the intersecting ridges of sand dunes. If this deposit were to become indurated and eroded, we might not be able to tell that they originated as wind-blown dunes, and interpret the polygons as evidence for a dried-up lake, for example. Dunes often accumulate in the bottoms on craters, also a good setting for a (temporary) lake.

The illumination is coming from the upper left, so the bluish ridges are high-standing.

 

[longknife]

Two Views of Iapetus

These two global images of Iapetus show the extreme brightness dichotomy on the surface of this peculiar Saturnian moon. The left-hand panel shows the moon's leading hemisphere and the right-hand panel shows the moon's trailing side. While low and mid latitudes of the leading side exhibit a surface almost as dark as charcoal, broad tracts of the trailing side are almost as bright as snow. The dark terrain covers about 40 percent of the surface and is named Cassini Regio. The names of the bright terrain are Roncevaux Terra (north) and Saragossa Terra (south)
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[longknife]

Galactic Wheels

How many rings do you see in this new image of the galaxy Messier 94, also known as NGC 4736? While at first glance one might see a number of them, astronomers believe there is just one. This image was captured in infrared light by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Historically, Messier 94 was considered to have two strikingly different rings: a brilliant, compact band encircling the galaxy's core, and a faint, broad, swath of stars falling outside its main disk.
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Dunes of Titan

Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show that the sizes and patterns of dunes on Saturn's moon Titan vary as a function of altitude and latitude. The dunes in areas that are more elevated or are higher in latitude, such as in the Fensal region pictured at bottom left, tend to be thinner and more widely separated, with gaps that have a thinner covering of sand. Dunes in the Belet region, pictured at top left, are at a lower altitude and latitude. The dunes in Belet are wider, with thicker blankets of sand between them. The Kalahari dunes in South Africa and Namibia, located in a region with limited sediment available and pictured at bottom right, show effects similar to the Fensal dunes. The Belet dunes on Titan resemble Earth's Oman dunes in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, where there is abundant sediment available. The Oman dunes are shown at top right.
Read more @ Wired Space Photo of the Day | Wired Science | Wired.com