Star Birth in Carina

beating apod to it once again (this is a sure bet for tomorrow's apod). the above image is released in celebration of the 17th anniversary of hubble's launch; it is one of the largest panoramic images ever taken by hubble. the image is composed of 48 images from the ACS taken with a hydrogen filter (green), and combined with data from cerro tololo of sulfur (red) and oxygen (blue).

the image shows a region around 50 lightyears wide within the carina nebula, and displays many stages of the process of stellar evolution. (image credit: well, hubble, of course)

Barred Spiral NGC 1672

pretty pretty pretty. barred spiral galaxy ngc 1672, from hubble.

Saturn Movies

i'm a bit late on this, but hubble recently released three movies of saturn, two of them showing several of saturn's moons in orbit around the planet, and the third one showing details of the planet's southern hemisphere. the "movies" are actually constructed from only about a dozen images, that were turned into the hundreds of images needed to make a movie with some fancy software. either way, the movies are quite cool. (image credit: hubble)

AEGIS: All-wavelength Extended Groth Strip International Survey

hubble's view of more than 50,000 galaxies in the constellation ursa major. here is the full press release. look here for beautiful high-resolution images. (image credit: hubble)

Return to Posting

after a six-month hiatus (a consequence of my complete immersion into graduate student life at the university of chicago physics department), i'm back. here is what i consider the most beautiful image that hubble has provided us with this year: a star-forming region in the smc (small magellanic cloud). one of the most fortunate pieces of news coming out of nasa in the last few months is that servicing mission 4 has been approved, which will provide hubble with all sorts of great things, like new batteries, new gyroscopes, and two new instruments: the wide field camera 3 (WFC3) and the cosmic origins spectrograph (COS). the servicing mission will take place sometime next year, and will extend hubble's life until 2013. given the role that hubble has played both in providing data for professional astronomers and in inspiring interest in science in the general public, this is fantastic news. (image credit: hubblesite.org)