Prime Focus

The End

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 09:04:29 -0500

I’ve decided to focus my blogging on fewer sites, so that means that I’m bringing Prime Focus to a close. Blogging about astrophotography and awesome space photos will continue on my (new, rebooted) personal blog: see the Astronomy & Space category.

The Mars Express spacecraft performed a flyby of Phobos, the...

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 12:17:22 -0500

The Mars Express spacecraft performed a flyby of Phobos, the larger of Mars’s two moons (and even so it’s only 27 km across along its longest axis), on January 9, 2011, passing within 100 km of Phobos’s surface, and returning images like these (there’s even a 3D image if you follow the link). Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum).

The Orion Nebula is one of my favourite things to observe...

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 11:56:00 -0500

The Orion Nebula is one of my favourite things to observe through a small telescope. Things get pretty interesting when you use the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, too. This image combines light taken through hydrogen-alpha, visual and ultraviolet filters. Credit: ESO and Igor Chekalin.

The Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8), as seen by the ESO’s VISTA...

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 11:44:50 -0500

The Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8), as seen by the ESO’s VISTA telescope through near-infrared filters. Credit: ESO/VVV; acknowledgment: Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit.

An oblique view of the Moon’s Aitken Crater from the Lunar...

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:48:19 -0500

An oblique view of the Moon’s Aitken Crater from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Aitken is on the far side of the Moon and is 135 km across; this photo looks over the southwest ridge of its central peak, with the northeast crater walls in the background. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.

Hanny’s Vorwerp, discovered by Dutch teacher Hanny van...

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 18:34:35 -0500

Hanny’s Vorwerp, discovered by Dutch teacher Hanny van Arkel in 2007 (“vorwerp” is Dutch for “object”), is an intergalactic oddity. Around 100,000 light years across, it is the visible part of a 300,000-light-year-long twisting rope of gas that wraps around the nearby spiral galaxy IC 2497. The galaxy is a former quasar, and the Vorwerp appears to have been lit up by the quasar’s light. In this Hubble image, the Vorwerp is coloured green, signalling the presence of ionized oxygen. Star formation is taking place on the side of the Vorwerp facing the galaxy. Both the Vorwerp and IC 2497 are 650 million light years away. More at Bad Astronomy and the HubbleSite. Credit: NASA, ESA, W. Keel (University of Alabama), and the Galaxy Zoo Team.

A false-colour image of sand dunes on the floor of Arkhangelsky...

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 16:35:32 -0500

A false-colour image of sand dunes on the floor of Arkhangelsky Crater in Mars’s southern hemisphere, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera. Near-infrared, red, and blue-green filters have been mapped to red, blue and green channels, respectively. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona.

Question: Which of these two moons is larger, and which of them...

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 10:14:57 -0500

Question: Which of these two moons is larger, and which of them is further away? Answer: Dione (top right) is both larger and further away than Enceladus (bottom left). Dione is twice the diameter of Enceladus (1123 km vs. 504 km), and from Cassini’s vantage point in this image acquired on December 1, 2010, Dione is 830,000 km away, versus Enceladus’s 510,000 km. Bad Astronomy, Universe Today. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

The Crab Nebula in X-ray – here in an image from the...

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 14:48:43 -0500

The Crab Nebula in X-ray – here in an image from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory – looks nothing like it does in visible light. Astronomers considered the Crab’s X-ray emissions so stable that they calibrated their instruments by it; recent observations, however, suggest a decline of several percentage points. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/F.

Spiral galaxy NGC 1345, about 85 million light years away in...

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 14:42:03 -0500

Spiral galaxy NGC 1345, about 85 million light years away in Eridanus, as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys through blue and near-infrared filters. (Infrared light is red in this image.) Look closely and you’ll see even more distant galaxies, tiny and reddish, surrounding NGC 1345. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA.

The Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla looks over the...

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 10:29:22 -0500

The Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla looks over the raw images from Cassini’s January 11 flyby of Rhea; she’s produced this colour composite of Rhea, with Dione and Saturn’s rings in the background, based on monochrome images taken through clear, infrared, green and ultraviolet filters. Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI; colour composite by Emily Lakdawalla.

On the left of this image, a Hubble image of Messier 51, the...

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 10:15:25 -0500

On the left of this image, a Hubble image of Messier 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, in visible light; on the right, an infrared image of the same galaxy with the starlight removed, revealing the galaxy’s dust structure in the near-infrared. Starlight glows in the infrared as well, so the visual-light image was used to subtract infrared starlight from the original infrared image. The original visual and infrared imagery were taken in 2005. Credits: NASA, ESA, M. Regan and B. Whitmore (STScI), and R. Chandar (University of Toledo), NICMOS image; NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), ACS image.

Messier 81 and Messier 82 are a pair of galaxies 12 million...

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 10:14:45 -0500

Messier 81 and Messier 82 are a pair of galaxies 12 million light years away in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major. They’re close enough to one another to be gravitationally interacting with each other, and you can actually see both galaxies at once through the telescope if your field of view is wide enough for it. But the galaxies themselves are quite different: M81 is a grand design spiral, whereas M82 a starburst galaxy with an unusually high rate of star formation (triggered, in M82’s case, by its close encounter with M81). That high rate of star formation really comes out in this WISE image, where M82 shines brightly in the greens and reds (indicating star formation), whereas M81 is much cooler. The standard WISE palette applies: blue represents infrared light at 3.4 µm, cyan 4.6 µm, green 12 µm and red 22 µm. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA.

Continuing our look at familiar galaxies in unfamiliar ways,...

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 10:14:17 -0500

Continuing our look at familiar galaxies in unfamiliar ways, here’s the nearby Triangulum Galaxy, M33, in infrared. It’s from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), with data from all four detectors: red is 22 µm (microns), green is 12 µm, cyan is 4.6 µm, and blue is 3.4 µm. Red and green represents mostly light from warm dust, while cyan and blue is mostly starlight. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA.

The Andromeda Galaxy is one of the best-known deep-sky objects...

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 10:05:00 -0500

The Andromeda Galaxy is one of the best-known deep-sky objects in the sky, but in this composite infrared/x-ray image it takes on a startlingly different appearance. Over Christmas, the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory captured the galaxy in the far infrared (orange), and XMM-Newton captured it in X-ray wavelengths (blue). Infrared reveals cold dust clouds and star formation; X-rays, stars at the end of their lives. Credits: ESA/Herschel/PACS/SPIRE/J. Fritz, U. Gent/XMM-Newton/EPIC/W. Pietsch, MPE.

Scanning the Red Planet

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 12:38:09 -0500

Scanning the Red Planet:

Like a scanner in orbit, the High Resolution Stereo Camera on the European Mars Express spacecraft has been imaging the surface of the Red Planet since 10 January 2004, spotting volcanoes, trenches, wrinkle ridges and impact craters. But before we can view the surface of Mars in 3D, the photos have to be sequenced, the data has to be checked, and only then can viewable imagery be generated. This is something that the researchers at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) Institute of Planetary Research (Institut für Planetenforschung) and the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin) have been doing for the last seven years.

Via @elakdawalla.

Another look at Saturn’s crazy moon Hyperion, courtesy of...

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 11:57:34 -0500

Another look at Saturn’s crazy moon Hyperion, courtesy of Cassini. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

Viewing familiar objects in unfamiliar wavelengths is always an...

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 11:54:57 -0500

Viewing familiar objects in unfamiliar wavelengths is always an eye-opener. Here’s the well-known Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8) through the eyes of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Once again, all four of WISE’s infrared detectors were used: blue represents infrared light at 3.4 µm, cyan 4.6 µm, green 12 µm and red 22 µm. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA.

IC 2944, the Lambda Centauri nebula, as seen by the Wide-field...

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 11:42:49 -0500

IC 2944, the Lambda Centauri nebula, as seen by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). All four of WISE’s infrared detectors were available for this false-colour image: blue represents infrared light at 3.4 µm, cyan 4.6 µm, green 12 µm and red 22 µm. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA.

This barred spiral galaxy, known as UGC 12158, is 400 million...

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 11:23:18 -0500

This barred spiral galaxy, known as UGC 12158, is 400 million light years away, but it resembles our own Milky Way in structure (though it is 40 percent larger). The bright blue star to the lower left of the galaxy’s core is actually a supernova in progress inside the galaxy – SN 2004ef. This image was taken by the Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys through hydrogen alpha and visual filters; light through the yellow filter has been assigned to the green channel. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA.