APOD: 2009 May 03 - The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble

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Andy Wade
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APOD: 2009 May 03 - The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble

Post by Andy Wade » Sun May 03, 2009 8:16 am

Excellent picture today!
I can just imagine being in the USS Enterprise watching the fury of the hot gas rolling towards me like some gigantic solar pyroclastic storm. What that must have looked like close up!

I did a quick google search and found a much better parka picture though:

ImageImage

That's more like it, isn't it? :D


Edited: to add la ink to the APOD page
Last edited by Andy Wade on Mon May 04, 2009 8:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Andy.

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Re: APOD: 2009 May 03 - The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble

Post by apodman » Sun May 03, 2009 11:53 am

neufer wrote:Image
image has been edited
Image

Free Parka-ing ?

---

Andy, that parka must cost a fortune to dry clean after a blizzard.

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Re: APOD: 2009 May 03 - The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble

Post by rstevenson » Sun May 03, 2009 12:20 pm

The description of this APOD says
The outer disk contains unusual light-year long orange filaments. The Eskimo Nebula spans about 1/3 of a light year ...
How does one cram a light-year long filament into a nebula only 1/3 of a light year wide?

Rob

P.S.
Andy, that parka must cost a fortune to dry clean after a blizzard.
Blizzards are generally composed of snow, aka, cold water. Dry-cleaning is not ordinarily necessary after a blizzard. :roll:

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Re: APOD: 2009 May 03 - The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble

Post by apodman » Sun May 03, 2009 12:26 pm

rstevenson wrote:Dry-cleaning is not ordinarily necessary after a blizzard.
Yeah, but my fur gets all matted and unmanageable.

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Re: APOD: 2009 May 03 - The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble

Post by rstevenson » Sun May 03, 2009 12:38 pm

apodman wrote:Yeah, but my fur gets all matted and unmanageable.
Ah well, a question of personal grooming then. :twisted:

Rob

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Re: APOD: 2009 May 03 - The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble

Post by neufer » Sun May 03, 2009 12:51 pm

rstevenson wrote:The description of this APOD says
The outer disk contains unusual light-year long orange filaments. The Eskimo Nebula spans about 1/3 of a light year ...
How does one cram a light-year long filament into a nebula only 1/3 of a light year wide?
NGC 2392 is hourglass shaped and we are looking down the axis.

The light-year long filaments are consequently foreshortened to about 1/3 of a light year (in radius).
http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/E/Eskimo_Nebula.html wrote:
Eskimo Nebula, NGC 2392

<<A planetary nebula in the constellation Gemini that looks like a face peering out of the fur-lined hood of parka. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1787. The parka is really a disk of material embellished with a ring of comet-shaped objects, with their tails streaming away from the central star. The Eskimo's face is formed from a bubble of material being blown into space by the central star's intense wind of high-speed material. The nebula is composed of two elliptically shaped lobes of matter streaming above and below the dying star.

Scientists believe that a ring of dense material around the star's equator, ejected during its red giant phase, created the nebula's shape. This dense waist of material is plodding along at 115,000 km/h, preventing high-velocity stellar winds from pushing matter along the equator. Instead, the 1.5-million-km/h winds are sweeping the material above and below the star, creating the elongated bubbles. The bubbles are not smooth like balloons but have filaments of denser matter. Each bubble is about 1 light-year long and about half a light-year wide. One possible explanation is that these objects formed from a collision of slow- and fast-moving gases.>>
---------------------------------------------
http://www.universetoday.com/2009/03/01/comet-lulin-approaches-m44-and-eskimo-nebula/ wrote:
# Wetdog Says:
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:25 pm

<<The term “Eskimo” is...a pejorative in Greenland and Canada, where the majority of circumpolar natives are Inuit. In Alaska and Siberia, the natives are not only Inuit but also Yupik and Aleut. To call a Yupik an Inuit is akin to calling a Mexican a Puerto Rican.

Perhaps the term [“Eskimo”] fell out of favor because of the meaning of the word as being “eaters of raw meat” in Cree, a rival Native American tribe. Since the Cree saw that practice as barbarian, it was said with disdain. The French voyageurs most likely did not pick up on that, but used the word “Esquimeaux.”

So, a circumpolar native in Canada may be insulted because it would be politically correct to be so. A Yupik in Alaska is not so politically inclined to become a “professional victim.” I’m sure he rather enjoys having a nebula named after his Peoples.>>
Art Neuendorffer

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Re: APOD: 2009 May 03 - The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble

Post by rstevenson » Sun May 03, 2009 1:42 pm

neufer wrote:NGC 2392 is hourglass shaped and we are looking down the axis.

The light-year long filaments are consequently foreshortened to about 1/3 of a light year (in radius).
Thanks Art. Now it makes sense.

Rob

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Re: APOD: 2009 May 03 - The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble

Post by neufer » Sun May 03, 2009 5:53 pm

----------------------------------------
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap090503.html wrote:
<<Explanation: In 1787, astronomer William Herschel discovered the Eskimo Nebula. From the ground, NGC 2392 resembles a person's head surrounded by a parka hood. The Eskimo Nebula is clearly a planetary nebula, and the gas seen above composed the outer layers of a Sun-like star only 10,000 years ago.>>

(Distance= ≥2,870 ly)
----------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo wrote:
<<The earliest known Eskimo cultures were Pre-Dorset Technology, which appear to have been a fully developed Eskimo culture that dates to 5,000 years ago. They appear to have evolved in Alaska from people using the Archaic Small Tools Technology, who probably had migrated to Alaska from Siberia at least 2 to 3 thousand years earlier; though they might have been in Alaska as far back as 10 to 12 thousand years or more. There are similar artifacts found in Siberia going back to perhaps 18,000 years ago.

There are two main groups referred to as Eskimo: Yupik and Inuit. A third group, the Aleut, is related. The Yupik language dialects and cultures in Alaska and eastern Siberia have evolved in place beginning with the original (pre-Dorset) Eskimo culture that developed in Alaska. Approximately 4,000 years ago the Aleut culture became distinctly separate, and evolved into a non-Eskimo culture. Approximately 1,500-2,000 years ago, apparently in Northwestern Alaska, two other distinct variations appeared. The Inuit language branch became distinct and in only several hundred years spread across northern Alaska, Canada and into Greenland. At about the same time, the Thule Technology also developed in northwestern Alaska and very quickly spread over the entire area occupied by Eskimo people, though it was not necessarily adopted by all of them.

Today the two main groups of Eskimos are the Inuit of northern Alaska, Canada and Greenland, and the Yupik, comprising speakers of four distinct Yupik languages and originating in western Alaska, in South Central Alaska along the Gulf of Alaska coast, and in the Russian Far East.>>
-----------------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit wrote:
<<The Inuit are the descendants of what anthropologists call the Thule culture, who emerged from western Alaska around 1000 AD and spread eastwards across the Arctic, displacing the related Dorset culture (in Inuktitut, the Tuniit). Inuit legends speak of the Tuniit as "giants", people who were taller and stronger than the Inuit. Researchers believe that the Dorset culture lacked dogs, larger weapons and other technologies that gave the expanding Inuit society an advantage over them. By 1300, the Inuit had settled in west Greenland, and finally moved into east Greenland over the following century.

After roughly 1350, the climate grew colder during the Little Ice Age The Inuit were forced to abandon hunting and whaling sites in the high Arctic. Bowhead whaling disappeared in Canada and Greenland, and the Inuit had to subsist on a much poorer diet. Without whales, they lost access to essential raw materials for tools and architecture that were derived from whaling.

The changing climate forced the Inuit to work their way south, pressuring them into marginal niches along the edges of the tree line which Native Americans had not occupied, or where they were weak enough for coexistence. There is evidence that they were still moving into new territory in southern Labrador in the 17th century, when they first began to interact with colonial North Americans.>>
Art Neuendorffer

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Re: APOD: 2009 May 03 - The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble

Post by Andy Wade » Sun May 03, 2009 6:45 pm

Then there's Kenny McCormick from South Park:
Image
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The Colors are False!

Post by NoelC » Sun May 03, 2009 7:30 pm

Hate to wade into the free association extravaganza with serious stuff, but I wanted to mention that once again a false-color Hubble image is being shown without it being clearly described as such.

The APOD text furthers this to the threshold of misinformation by describing "unusual light-year long orange filaments". Ground-based visible light images generally show them as more a combination of pink and teal (which by a stretch of the imagination could be considered "orange" possibly). However, the nebula is most certainly NOT, when viewed in visible light, anywhere near the color of today's APOD. One thing I've always found fascinating is that in visible light it has a vivid blue center.

Unfortunately, the very concept of "false color" isn't easy for most folks to understand, and presenting NGC 2392 without at least mentioning that the color is false is IMO irresponsible because it misleads people into believing the nebula really looks orange.

Many/most Hubble images are not presented in colors we would see if we had eyes the size of the Hubble simply because primarily it is a science instrument and the images are made from science observations taken through a mix of various filters. The Hubble DOES have wideband red, green, and blue filters, but they are rarely used as Hubble time is generally too valuable to use up taking pretty pictures simply for show.

The Hubble image shown, primarily because of its amazing resolution, virtually dominates the Internet, but for reference here are several ground-based visible-light Eskimo Nebula images turned up by a quick internet search for comparison:

http://www.noao.edu/outreach/aop/observers/n2392.html
http://www.company7.com/sbig/images/eskimo_2kc.jpg
http://www.dilbertobs.com/images/eskimo2.jpg
http://ccarboni.home.att.net/NGC_2392_T ... Nebula.jpg
http://www.caelumobservatory.com/gallery/n2392cocs.jpg
http://www.kellysky.net/2392larg.jpg

-Noel

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Re: APOD: 2009 May 03 - The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble

Post by bhrobards » Sun May 03, 2009 8:27 pm

Check out the helical structure near the edge of the upper, outer band in the photo. Its almost as if it were a toroidal Birkland current.

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"Oh my God, they killed Kenny!"

Post by neufer » Sun May 03, 2009 8:48 pm

Andy Wade wrote:Then there's Kenny McCormick from South Park:
Image
--------------------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_McCormick wrote:
<<Kenny ("aristarchusinexile" :wink: ) McCormick is a nine-year-old fourth-grade student living with his relatively poor family in the fictional town of South Park, Colorado. Kenny is fond of toilet humor and pornography, and when it comes to sexually-related subjects, he is the most knowledgeable of the group. Others will typically ask for his explanation of sexual matters unknown to them. Kenny's lechery is also one of his prominent characteristics; his bedroom walls are frequently shown to adorn posters of bikini-clad models, and he has lusted over several girls and women over the course of the series, while also having dated two fellow female students.

Kenny's parka hood is always tightly drawn, leaving only his eyes (and un-animated nose) exposed. Sometimes, when he is frightened, he will tighten the cords on his hood to hide even more of his face. As a result, all of Kenny's spoken lines are heavily muffled. While his friends understand him easily, adult residents often have problems understanding Kenny's speech, requiring the others to translate for him. The effect of Kenny's speech is achieved by Stone mumbling into his own hand as he provides Kenny's lines. As the technique of Kenny's muzzled enunciation frequently implies, many of his lines are indeed profane and sexually-explicit, the lengthier of which are mostly improvised by Stone. Closed-caption encoding depicts Kenny's speech as if it were intelligible.

He first appeared unobscured by the hood in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, where it was revealed that he had messy blond hair. In a cameo appearance during this moment in the film, Mike Judge provided the voice for Kenny's one line of uninsulated dialogue.

Kenny gets along generally well with his friends Stan and Kyle. Kenny's friendship with Cartman is more complex. Cartman often teases Kenny about his poverty, with Kenny usually reacting angrily. Kenny wrote in his will that he did not like Cartman, but "felt sorry" for him. On the other hand, it has been indicated that Kenny and Cartman consider themselves to be best friends. The two are often the only ones to laugh at the other's jokes or antics.

Prior to season six, Kenny died in almost every episode, with only a few exceptions. This was often followed by the catchphrase "Oh my God, they killed Kenny! ...You bastards!" (or some variation of it), usually said by Stan and Kyle, respectively. Stone and Parker revealed that when Stan or Kyle would exclaim "they" and "you bastards" to apparently no one in particular, they are actually referring to Stone and Parker themselves, as though they were an omnipresence within the show's universe. It was also common for a number of rats to suddenly appear and begin picking at his corpse.

Following his death in "Kenny Dies", he failed to reappear in several of the following episodes, having seemingly been killed off for good by the show's creators. Despite this, Kenny returned to the show less than one year later, first as a spirit possessing Cartman in "A Ladder to Heaven", then as his old self in "Red Sleigh Down". Since then, Kenny has died in only a small number of episodes, most recently in the Season 13 premiere where he died of syphilis.

In the book South Park and Philosophy: Bigger, Longer, and More Penetrating, an essay by Southern Illinois University philosophy professor Dr. Randall Auxier, entitled "Killing Kenny: Our Daily Dose of Death", suggests that the fashion of the recurring gag serves to help the viewer become more comfortable with the inevitability of their own death.>>
Art Neuendorffer

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Re: APOD: 2009 May 03 - The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble

Post by apodman » Sun May 03, 2009 8:51 pm

bhrobards wrote:Check out the helical structure near the edge of the upper, outer band in the photo. Its almost as if it were a toroidal Birkland current.
Birkeland currents are real phenomena in aurorae.

I tried to find out if they are real phenomena in planetary nebulae, but all the references I could find were published by the electric universe and plasma cosmology lobby. Are there any references to Birkeland currents in planetary nebulae published by legitimate sources? Do Birkeland currents really exist in planetary nebulae?

---

And what's all this about South Parka?

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Re: The Colors are False!

Post by neufer » Sun May 03, 2009 9:15 pm

NoelC wrote:Hate to wade into the free association extravaganza with serious stuff, but I wanted to mention that once again a false-color Hubble image is being shown without it being clearly described as such.

The APOD text furthers this to the threshold of misinformation by describing "unusual light-year long orange filaments". Ground-based visible light images generally show them as more a combination of pink and teal (which by a stretch of the imagination could be considered "orange" possibly).

http://www.noao.edu/outreach/aop/observers/n2392.html
http://www.company7.com/sbig/images/eskimo_2kc.jpg
http://www.dilbertobs.com/images/eskimo2.jpg
http://ccarboni.home.att.net/NGC_2392_T ... Nebula.jpg
http://www.caelumobservatory.com/gallery/n2392cocs.jpg
http://www.kellysky.net/2392larg.jpg
--------------------------------------------------
  • Awareness ribbon color chart:
Image
  • ----------------------------------------
    SEINFELD Episode no. 119
    New scene - Hubble in the HBC walk.
    ....................................
    Inuit #1: Hey, where's your pink & teal ribbon?

    Hubble: Oh, I don't wear the pink & teal ribbon.

    Inuit #2: Oh, you don't wear the pink & teal ribbon? Aren't you against HBC?

    Hubble: Yeah, I'm against HBC. I mean, I'm walking, aren't I?
    I just don't wear the pink & teal ribbon.

    Inuit #3: Who do you think you are?

    Inuit #1: Put the pink & teal ribbon on!

    Inuit #2: Hey, Cartman! Kenny! This guy won't wear a pink & teal ribbon!
    <Cartman and Kenny turn around and glare at Hubble.>

    Kenny: Who? Who does not want to wear the pink & teal ribbon?
    ----------------------------------------
Art Neuendorffer

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Re: APOD: 2009 May 03 - The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble

Post by neufer » Sun May 03, 2009 9:37 pm

apodman wrote:
bhrobards wrote:Check out the helical structure near the edge of the upper, outer band in the photo. Its almost as if it were a toroidal Birkland current.
Birkeland currents are real phenomena in aurorae.

I tried to find out if they are real phenomena in planetary nebulae, but all the references I could find were published by the electric universe and plasma cosmology lobby. Are there any references to Birkeland currents in planetary nebulae published by legitimate sources? Do Birkeland currents really exist in planetary nebulae?
hhttp://tinyurl.com/2pxdu5

Auroral-like Birkeland currents created by scientist Kristian Birkeland in his terrella,
featuring a magnetised anode globe in an evacuated chamber.

Image
Art Neuendorffer

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Re: APOD: 2009 May 03 - The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble

Post by kovil » Sun May 03, 2009 11:05 pm

Yes Birkeland Currents are real, and they are what compose the filaments in all Planetary Nebulas into filaments, via the magnetic fields that arise following their current flows. The Eskimo Nebula is seen by us looking down the longitudinal axis almost exactly, and that's why it looks totally different, even though it is the same phenomena as the Planetary Nebula M2-9

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050612.html

M2-9 is one of the best examples of a planetary nebula showing off its "electric double layers", also called "Double Layers" (DL).
DL's are quite inscrutable and quixotic in their properties and behaviours, which is why we are not nearly fully knowledgeable enough about them, and the NSF should appropriate a couple of billion$ to study them by some real professional scientists with state of the art equipment in full size laboratories, if the US is to have any chance of remaining at the forefront of truly understanding what's happening out there.

PS: M2-9 is not, in contradiction to what the APOD photo description says, a 'dying star', far from it, it is giving birth !!
It is giving birth to an electrically generated display of immense beauty, and is organizing particles into energized shapes, that to this observer will result in 'life friendly' habitats later on. Who says Life doesn't imitate Art !

PPS: Au contraire ! A great deal is known about the electric forces that constitute planetary nebulas, but Mainstream Science won't submit to having any dialogue with electrical engineers or the well developed branch of science that understands electricity, for some reason known only to Mainstream Science. And by this behaviour Mainstream Science is behaving like a Diva, who is more interested in maintaining her status quo than in learning any truth about the 'real world'.

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Re: APOD: 2009 May 03 - The Eskimo Nebula from Hubble

Post by aristarchusinexile » Mon May 04, 2009 2:49 pm

Wow, then, Hillarious .. move this one to global warming and use black blizzards as a reason to open a floating dry cleaning establishment at the North Pole.
Duty done .. the rain will stop as promised with the rainbow.
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