Found images: 2017 May

[starsurfer]

LDN 183
http://www.starpointing.com/ccd/ldn183.html
Copyright: Fabian Neyer

[Ian Regan]

Cassini's "Grand Finale" Saturn Portrait (Annotated Version) (April 13, 2017)

[starsurfer]

Fox Fur Nebula
http://www.astrostudio.at/1_Deep%20Sky% ... c6f64f122e
Copyright: Gerald Rhemann

Click to view full size image

[starsurfer]

Little Dumbbell Nebula (M76)
http://astro-koop.de/?attachment_id=1811
Copyright: Stefan Heutz, Wolfgang Ries and Michael Breite

Click to view full size image

[starsurfer]

Cocoon Nebula (IC 5146)
http://www.astrobin.com/205861/
Copyright: Francois Doussoux

[starsurfer]

Holmberg II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmberg_ ... scope).tif
Copyright: NASA/JPL-Caltech/K. Gordon (STScI), SINGS

This galaxy is also catalogued as UGC 4305.

[starsurfer]

Sh2-140
http://afesan.es/Deepspace/slides/SH2%2 ... us%29.html
Copyright: Antonio Sánchez

[starsurfer]

IC 3104
http://members.pcug.org.au/~stevec/ic31 ... 0_RC14.htm
Copyright: Steve Crouch

The surrounding dust belongs to the Chamaeleon III complex.

[bystander]

ALMA Explores Fomalhaut’s Debris Disc
ESO Picture of the Week | 2017 May 22

[img3="Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/L. Matrà/M. A. MacGregor"]https://cdn.eso.org/images/large/potw1721a.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]

Fomalhaut is one of the brightest stars in the sky. At roughly 25 light-years away the star lies especially close to us, and can be seen shining brightly in the constellation of Piscis Austrinus (The Southern Fish). This image from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) shows Fomalhaut (centre) encircled by a ring of dusty debris — this is the first time this scene has been captured at such high resolution and sensitivity at millimetre wavelengths.

Fomalhaut’s disc comprises a mix of cosmic dust and gas from comets in the Fomalhaut system (exocomets), released as the exocomets graze past and smash into one another. This turbulent environment resembles an early period in our own Solar System known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, which occurred approximately four billions years ago. This era saw huge numbers of rocky objects hurtle into the inner Solar System and collide with the young terrestrial planets, including Earth, where they formed a myriad of impact craters — many of which remain visible today on the surfaces of planets such as Mercury and Mars.

Fomalhaut is known to be surrounded by several discs of debris — the one visible in this ALMA image is the outermost one. The ring is approximately 20 billion kilometers from the central star and about 2 billion kilometers wide. Such a relative narrow, eccentric disc can only be produced by the gravitational influence of planets in the system, like Jupiter’s gravitational influence on our asteroid belt. In 2008 the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope discovered the famous exoplanet Fomalhaut b orbiting within this belt, but the planet is not visible in this ALMA image.

http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?t=37192

[bystander]

Inflating Sh2-308
ESA Hubble Picture of the Week | 2017 May 22

[img3="Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA"]https://cdn.spacetelescope.org/archives ... w1721a.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope still has a few tricks up its sleeve in its task of exploring the Universe. For one, it is able to image two adjacent parts of the sky simultaneously. It does this using two different cameras — one camera can be trained on the target object itself, and the other on a nearby patch of sky so that new and potentially interesting regions of the cosmos can be observed at the same time (these latter observations are known as parallel fields).

This image shows part of a bubble-like cloud of gas — a nebula named Sh2-308 — surrounding a massive and violent star named EZ Canis Majoris. It uses observations from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, and is the parallel field associated with another view of the nebula produced by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.

EZ Canis Majoris is something known as a Wolf-Rayet star, and is one of the brightest known stars of its kind. Its outer shell of hydrogen gas has been used up, revealing inner layers of heavier elements that burn at ferocious temperatures. The intense radiation pouring out from EZ Canis Majoris forms thick stellar winds that whip up nearby material, sculpting and blowing it outwards.

These processes have moulded the surrounding gas into a vast bubble. A bubble nebula produced by a Wolf-Rayet star is made of ionised hydrogen (HII), which is often found in interstellar space. In this case, it is the outer hydrogen layers of EZ Canis Majoris — the bubble — that are being inflated by the deluge of radiation — the air — coming from the central star. The fringes of these bubbles are nebulous and wispy, as can be seen in this image.

[starsurfer]

Inflating Sh2-308
ESA Hubble Picture of the Week | 2017 May 22

[img3="Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA"]https://cdn.spacetelescope.org/archives ... w1721a.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope still has a few tricks up its sleeve in its task of exploring the Universe. For one, it is able to image two adjacent parts of the sky simultaneously. It does this using two different cameras — one camera can be trained on the target object itself, and the other on a nearby patch of sky so that new and potentially interesting regions of the cosmos can be observed at the same time (these latter observations are known as parallel fields).

This image shows part of a bubble-like cloud of gas — a nebula named Sh2-308 — surrounding a massive and violent star named EZ Canis Majoris. It uses observations from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, and is the parallel field associated with another view of the nebula produced by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.

EZ Canis Majoris is something known as a Wolf-Rayet star, and is one of the brightest known stars of its kind. Its outer shell of hydrogen gas has been used up, revealing inner layers of heavier elements that burn at ferocious temperatures. The intense radiation pouring out from EZ Canis Majoris forms thick stellar winds that whip up nearby material, sculpting and blowing it outwards.

These processes have moulded the surrounding gas into a vast bubble. A bubble nebula produced by a Wolf-Rayet star is made of ionised hydrogen (HII), which is often found in interstellar space. In this case, it is the outer hydrogen layers of EZ Canis Majoris — the bubble — that are being inflated by the deluge of radiation — the air — coming from the central star. The fringes of these bubbles are nebulous and wispy, as can be seen in this image.

Wow that is such a small part of the whole bubble! Some of my favourite amateur images:
1. Don Goldman
2. Kfir Simon
3. Atacama Photographic Observatory

The first amateur image might have been this one by Dean Salman.

[starsurfer]

Ced 110 and Ced 111
http://www.astro-austral.cl/imagenes/ne ... a/info.htm
Copyright: José Joaquín Pérez

Ced 111 is the blue reflection nebula on the right and Ced 110 is the white reflection nebula to the left of it. The bright reflection nebula near the left is IC 2631. They are part of the Chamaeleon I complex.

[starsurfer]

North America Nebula (NGC 7000)
http://www.caelumobservatory.com/galler ... ogee.shtml
Copyright: Adam Block and Tim Puckett

[starsurfer]

B22 and IC 2087
http://bf-astro.com/ic2087/ic2087.htm
Copyright: Bob Franke

[starsurfer]

NGC 3621
http://www.astrobin.com/240618/0/
Copyright: Ray Johnson

[starsurfer]

NGC 6604
https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1218/
Copyright: ESO

[starsurfer]

NGC 6992-5
http://astrophotography.aa6g.org/Astrop ... -sx16.html
Copyright: Chuck Vaughn

[bystander]

Guarding the Galactic Heart
ESO Picture of the Week | 2017 May 29

[img3="Credit: Yuri Beletsky (LCO) / ESO"]https://cdn.eso.org/images/screen/potw1722a.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]

Like sentries guarding the heart of our home galaxy, the ESO 3.6-metre telescope and the Coudé Auxiliary Telescope stand tall in this stunning ultra high definition photograph from the La Silla Observatory, situated in the southern outskirts of the Chilean Atacama Desert.

Since its inauguration in 1976, the ESO 3.6-metre telescope has undergone various upgrades, including the installation of a new secondary mirror that has allowed the telescope to remain as efficient and productive as ever. Since 2008, the telescope has housed the HARPS spectrograph, the most precise exoplanet hunter in the world. HARPS, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher, is the most successful finder of low-mass exoplanets to date.

The now-decommissioned 1.4-metre Coudé Auxiliary Telescope (CAT) is housed in the smaller dome to the right of the 3.6-metre telescope. When active, the telescope fed the 3.6-metre’s Coudé Echelle Spectrometer through a light tunnel, which can be seen connecting the two facilities in this photograph. Fully computer controlled, CAT was used for many different types of astronomical observations, including measuring the ages of ancient stars.

Positioned 2400 metres above sea level and located far from sources of light pollution, the ESO 3.6-metre telescope experiences excellent observing conditions, as does the observatory’s entire family of telescopes. This family includes the New Technology Telescope (NTT), the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope, and a selection of national telescopes.

[bystander]

Viewing the Vermin Galaxy
ESA Hubble Picture of the Week | 2017 May 29

[img3="Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA"]https://cdn.spacetelescope.org/archives ... w1722a.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is famous for its jaw-dropping snapshots of the cosmos. At first glance this Picture of the Week appears to be quite the opposite, showing just a blur of jagged spikes, speckled noise, and weird, clashing colours — but once you know what you are looking at, images like this one are no less breathtaking.

This shows a distant galaxy — visible as the smudge to the lower right — as it begins to align with and pass behind a star sitting nearer to us within the Milky Way. This is an event known as a transit. The star is called HD 107146, and it sits at the centre of the frame. Its light has been blocked in this image to make its immediate surroundings and the faint galaxy visible — the position of the star is marked with a green circle.

The concentric orange circle surrounding HD 107146 is a circumstellar disc — a disc of debris orbiting the star. In the case of HD 107146 we see the disc face-on. As this star very much resembles our Sun, it is an interesting scientific target to study: its circumstellar disc could be analogous to the asteroids in our Solar System and the Kuiper belt.

A detailed study of this system is possible because of the much more distant galaxy — nicknamed the “Vermin Galaxy” by some to reflect their annoyance at its presence — as the star passes in front of it. The unusual pairing was first observed in 2004 by Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, and again in 2011 by Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. The latter image is shown here, as the Vermin Galaxy began its transit behind HD 107146. The galaxy will not be fully obscured until around 2020, but interesting science can be done even while the galaxy is only partly obscured. Light from the galaxy will pass through the star’s debris discs before reaching our telescopes, allowing us to study the properties of the light and how it changes, and thus infer the characteristics of the disc itself.

[starsurfer]

vdB27 region
http://www.astrosurf.com/ilizaso/orriak ... Q_U16m.htm
Copyright: Iñaki Lizaso

[starsurfer]

Hickson 61
http://www.astrobin.com/290615/
Copyright: Tero Turunen

This is a nice box of galaxies.

[starsurfer]

Leo Trio
http://www.astropilar.com.ar/galaxias/L ... let_1.html
Copyright: Ezequiel Bellocchio