Close-up picture of the comet LJ. Re-processed raw data from 11. Jan-2015, and taken with a 16" SCT. http://www.astro-hp.dk
Copyright: Niels V. Christensen
In this image the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope takes a close look at the spiral galaxy NGC 4217, located 60 million light-years away from Earth. The galaxy is seen almost perfectly edge on and is a perfect candidate for studying the nature of extraplanar dust structures — the patterns of gas and dust above and below the plane on the galaxy, seen here as brown wisps coming off NGC 4217.
These tentacle-like filaments are visible in the Hubble image only because the contrast with their surroundings is so high. This implies that the structures are denser than their surroundings. The image shows dozens of dust structures some of which reach as far as 7,000 light-years away from the central plane. Typically the structures have a length of about 1,000 light-years and are about 400 light-years in width.
Some of the dust filaments are round or irregular clouds, others are vertical columns, loop-like structures or vertical cones. These structures can help astronomers to identify the mechanisms responsible for the ejection of gas and dust from the galactic plane of spiral galaxies and reveal information on the transport of the interstellar medium to large distances away from galactic disks.
The properties of the observed dust structures in NGC 4217 suggest that the gas and dust were driven out of the mid-plane of the galaxy by powerful stellar winds resulting from supernovae — explosions that mark the deaths of massive stars.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
Processing: R. Colombari
Asteroid 2004 BL86 together with mountain Copyrights: Alfred Dufter
Ice Halo at 30,000 feet Copyrights: De Ann Troen
Re: Submissions: 2015 February
Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2015 1:29 pm
by kuulkers
To boldly go where no-one has gone before: an INTEGRAL travel through Galactic space
A first-ever: from behind the Galactic Centre we are facing towards our Sun (the tiny yellow blob just above the centre of the image). This image is a still from the movie containing the results from the Galactic bulge monitoring program and a 3D journey through Galactic space (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfexQlB8GOc). During the first part of the movie a time-lapse view of our Galactic Centre region is shown in 2D in hard X-rays / soft gamma-rays: it is a kind of Christmas tree, with high-energy sources brightening and fading on all time scales. During the second, 3D part of the movie one first zooms out of the Galaxy, showing a bird's eye view of the gamma and hard X-ray sources in our Galaxy detected by INTEGRAL, and then conclude with a fly-through of the central part of the Galactic bulge, before returning to our Solar System and the orbit of INTEGRAL around Earth. More stills, as well as more movies can be found at http://integral.esac.esa.int/BULGE/links/Movies.html.
From the previous image
"...My favorite of all the shoots...the dark side of the lit moon and the lens aberrations throwing light back towards the comet look so neat to me... "
The Whole Moon That Night 1/25/2015
