Astronomy Picture thread

[Perfection]

Obi Wan Kenobi: That's no space station, that's a moon!

 

[Knowze Gungk]

I love this one, but I'd have named it Brain, not Eskimo.

 

[Perfection]

It's Saturn! What a Bueaty!

If we lived on Mimas (The Moon on the top of the page) we could see it every day!

 

[Mark Young]

This is a picture of the jewel box cluster.
I regularly look at in the night sky.

@ puglover
What moon is that a picture of?

@I have a 3.5" Tasco reflector on loan from a work colleague but
I'm saving for a 6" which will set me back about $500

 

[Gingerbread Man]

This is pure background material! It is hard to choose which one I will set!

Keep it going

 

[Aphex_Twin]

Background view of the VLT ESA observatory. It's the largest in the World and has a better resolution than Hubble !

One of the telescopes, gazing up at the sky...

They actually shaved off the tip of a mountain to build those things...

 

[Gothmog]

I posted these in a similar thread in another forum.

The Hubble Deep Field South. This part represents 10x10 arcseconds of angle, and arcsecond is 1/3600 part of a single degree.

A solar storm.

This next object is known as M87 (a galaxy) and is believed to house a supermassive black hole, which has swallowed up a mass equivalent to 2 billion times the mass of our Sun.
The jet originates in the disk of superheated gas swirling around this black hole and is propelled and concentrated by the intense, twisted magnetic fields trapped within this plasma.
The light that we see is produced by electrons twisting along magnetic field lines in the jet, a process known as synchrotron radiation, which gives the jet its bluish tint.
The jet is approximately 5000 lightyears long and is moving at nearly the speed of light.

At a distance of 50 million light-years, M87 is too distant for Hubble to discern individual stars.
The dozens of star-like points swarming about M87 are, instead, themselves clusters of hundreds of thousands of stars each.

 

[DvR]

If it's a clear sky tonight you can see this baby:

In 7 days from now, mars will be very close to earth.. Last time it was this close was about 73.000 years ago..

The distance it's away from us on the 27th is 55.758.006 kilometres, which is relatively close..
If the sky is clear tonight, you should be able to see it easily.. It won't be hard to recognise, since it's the brightest object in the sky apart from the moon, and it's a little bit red/yellowish..
If you've got a pair of binoculars and manage to hold em very still you'll be able to see it's a little sphere..

 

[Perfection]

M31, the andromeda galaxy, the nearest spiral galaxy to ours

 

[Aphex_Twin]

A stunning piece of sky !

 

[Civrules]

This one.

Cool eh?

 

[Chris1111]

Famous picture of earth taken by Voyager 1 when it was more then 4 billion miles away back in 1991.

6 billion people are crammed into that tiny speck.

 

[Perfection]

Here's another picture of a dying star

 

[Aphex_Twin]

This represents the distribution of galaxies in patch of just 1/10 of the sky... Hardly a place to throw a needle...

 

[Stile]

"This visible-light picture, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 1999, reveals an intergalactic "pipeline" of material flowing between two battered galaxies that bumped into each other about 100 million years ago. The pipeline is the dark string of matter stretching 20,000 light-years between NGC 1410 at left and NGC 1409 at right."

 

[Cimbri]

Extent of mankinds radiobroadcasts

 

[Cimbri]

Perfection allready posted Andromeda, but here she is again:

 

[Aphex_Twin]

Originally posted by Cimbri
Extent of mankinds radiobroadcasts

What does the red circle represent? I don't think humans began using walkie-talkies 50,000 years ago...

 

[DvR]

Even that yellow circle could have a radius of a few hundred lightyears..

 

[Civrules]

This is a beautiful seen from a dying star.