Post
by Ann » Wed Jun 02, 2010 3:27 am
There were a number of goodies here. I'm impressed.
The cosmic zoo in the Large Magellanic Cloud was interesting, but you had to follow the link to see the whole picture and learn more about the wild beasts in there. There is an annotated image that you can find via the link. Don't miss it.
Similarly, you had to follow the link to see M53 and NGC 5053 together. Both these clusters are globulars, but while M53 is densely populated, NGC 5053 is a globular going bald of its stars. In my old Burnham's Celestial Handbook, the author writes, if I remember correctly, that NGC 5053 looks so different from M53 that for a long time astronomers thought that NGC 5053 must be an open cluster. But its stellar population is the same as the one of M53, its stars are just as metal poor, its turn-off point from the main sequence is at the same location etecetera, so it's a globular all right. You have to wonder if NGC 5053 was born with far fewer stars than M 53 (a distinct possibility) or if it has lost many more of its stars for some reason.
It isn't as if we all haven't seen the Pleiades a million times before (because if you are an easily accessible cosmic beauty which from our vantage point is one of a kind, you tend to get photographed over and over and over, which has happened to the Orion Nebula, too). But this picture was unusually good. Many Pleiades pictures "drown in blue", but here the blue reflection nebula and the blue color of the brightest stars was not allowed to overwhelm the orangish color of some of the fainter stars. Also the resolution was extremely crisp and clear. Note the details in the reflection nebula and the myriad of faint background stars. Well done.
All in all, the Mauna Kea All-sky image must be my favorite. When I first looked at it, it looked like nothing, just a blurry black and white image showing some telescopes against a badly resolved grey scale starless sky. But when you started using the "control panel", pretty amazing things happened, and the image became a color picture which was crisp and clear. Not to mention that you could move around and go on your own personal all-sky tour and examine the constellations. It was irritating that I could identify so few of the constellations, although I did see the Big and the Small Dipper, Cassiopeia, The Summer Triangle, Sagittarius and Scorpius.
So the Mauna Kea image gets my vote, but the pictures were all interesting.
Color Commentator
