Posts Tagged milky way
The Milky Way, Over Storms, Over Africa
Posting on a stormy Friday night? Why not? This is BEAUTIFUL. (I suppose technically it’s “Vidspam”, not Picspam.)
Two Hemispheres
Image Credit & Copyright: Tunç Tezel and Stéphane Guisard (TWAN)
What are we looking at? A full panorama of the Milky Way, as seen from both Northern and Southern Hemispheres of the earth…
A quest to find planet Earth’s darkest night skies led to this intriguing panorama. In projection, the mosaic view sandwiches the horizons visible in all-sky images taken from the northern hemisphere’s Canary Island of La Palma (top) and the south’s high Atacama Desert between the two hemispheres of the Milky Way Galaxy. The photographers’ choice of locations offered locally dark skies enjoyed by La Palma’s Roque de los Muchachos Observatory and Paranal Observatory in Chile. But it also allowed the directions to the Milky Way’s north and south galactic poles to be placed near the local zenith. That constrained the faint, diffuse glow of the plane of the Milky Way to the mountainous horizons. As a result, an even fainter S-shaped band of light, sunlight scattered by dust along the solar system’s ecliptic plane, can be completely traced through both northern and southern hemisphere night skies.
Milky Way Path
I’m breaking my “no Monday posting” rule because I really want to share this beautiful photo with you. It looks like poetry to me; a poem yet to be written, perhaps. The color is enchanting; the depth of the sky, intoxicating. The whole thing is tremendously inspiring! I’ve seen Milky Way + road photos before — always a striking composition — but this one stands out from the rest in my mind. The colors, the dark silhouettes of the trees, the lighting of the road… it’s fabulous, plain and simple. I can’t throw enough adjectives at it!
Dark River Panorama
Credit & Copyright: Rogelio Bernal Andreo, blog.deepskycolors.com
Both these images are part of a larger panorama; I present in in halves so you can see it embiggered. Because all pretty space pictures should be presented as large as possible!
A Dark River of dust seems to run from our Galactic Center, then pool into a starfield containing photogenic sky wonders. Scrolling right will reveal many of these objects including (can you find?) the bright orange star Antares, a blue(-eyed) horsehead nebula, the white globular star cluster M4, the bright blue star system Rho Ophiuchi, the dark brown Pipe nebula, the red Lagoon nebula, the red and blue Trifid nebula, the red Cat’s Paw Nebula, and the multicolored but still important center of our Galaxy. This wide view captures in exquisite detail about 50 degrees of the nighttime sky, 100 times the size of the full Moon, covering constellations from the Archer (Sagittarius) through the Snake Holder (Ophiuchus), to the Scorpion (Scorpius). The Dark River itself can be identified as the brown dust lane connected to Antares, and spans about 100 light years. Since the Dark River dust lane lies only about 500 light years away, it only appears as a bridge to the much more distant Galactic Center, that actually lies about 25,000 light years farther away.
Credit & Copyright: Rogelio Bernal Andreo, blog.deepskycolors.com
The Night
Posted by Danielle in Books & Literature, Picspam on March 30, 2010
Credit: Heidi Schweiker, WIYN, NOAO, AURA, NSF
I started Tau Zero by Poul Anderson the other night, and was struck by his description of the size of the universe as a ship is about to launch out into it — so much so that I scribbled down one of the lines into a notebook, half-asleep. Here it is (emphasis mine), too good to keep to myself:
Staring away from sun and planet, you saw a crystal darkness huger than you dared comprehend. It did not appear totally black; there were light reflections within your eyeballs, if nowhere else; but it was the final night, that our kindly sky holds from us. The stars thronged it, unwinking, their brilliance winter-cold. Those sufficiently luminous to be seen from the ground showed their colors clear in space: steel-blue Vega, golden Capella, ember of Betelgeuse. And if you were not trained, the lesser members of the galaxy that had become visible were so many as to drown the familiar constellations. The night was wild with suns.
And the Milky Way belted heaven with ice and silver; and the Magellanic Clouds were not vague shimmers but roiling and glowing; and the Andromeda Galaxy gleamed sharp across more than a million light-years; and you felt your soul drowning in those depths and hastily pulled your vision back to the snug cabin that held you.
More Space Tees
Posted by Danielle in Fashion & Accessories on February 23, 2010
“I Only Surf on Comets” by Peter Kramar
Posting two cool tees I saw recently on Threadless (via @moonrangerlaura.)
“The Milky Way” by Budi Satria Kwan
Milky Way Transit Authority
Posted by Danielle in Tidbits & Sundry on January 18, 2010
Map created by Samuel Arbesman
I have to say, I am just in AWE of this terrific concept by Samuel Arbesman. Not only does it ingeniously illustrate the relative positions of things in our galaxy, it mimics possibly my favorite map in the process (does one have such a thing as a favorite map? I hadn’t considered it until now, but yes, my statement is accurate: the Tube map is definitely my favorite map.)
This map is an attempt to approach our galaxy with a bit more familiarity than usual and get people thinking about long-term possibilities in outer space. Hopefully it can provide as a useful shorthand for our place in the Milky Way, the ‘important’ sights, and make inconceivable distances a bit less daunting. And while convenient interstellar travel is nothing more than a murky dream, and might always be that way, there is power in creating tools for beginning to wrap our minds around the interconnections of our galactic neighborhood.
Read the whole thing, it’s worthwhile.
Happy 2010!
Posted by Danielle in Tidbits & Sundry on January 1, 2010
Sky photo credit & copyright: Tony Hallas, astrophoto.com
Tony Hallas doesn’t know how his photo above thrilled me to bits on Christmas Day — I never dreamed I’d see my home-mountain — is that a term? I live at the foot of it — on APOD! I live near Mount Shasta, California, which is on the right side of his photo; I’ve cropped it above to show just Mt. Shasta, because it’s clearly better than Mt. Lassen and YES I AM EXTREMELY BIASED, I DON’T CARE! (If you don’t believe me, see for yourself. And if you like those sites, click here, eheh. Thank you.)
Anyway, all mountain-bias aside, I’d like to wish all my visitors and regular readers a very happy 2010 — may yours be especially awesome! Thanks for your (site) patronage!!
Milky Way Waterfall
Milky Way Waterfall © Masahiro Miyasaka, taken at Zengoroodaki Waterfall, Norikura, Nagano, Japan
This is the overall winner of the Galilean Nights Astrophotography competition (part of the International Year of Astronomy), taken at a beautiful waterfall in Nagano Prefecture, Japan. This photo won the Earth and Sky division, as well as the overall competition; oddly enough, second runner-up in Earth and Sky was also shot in Nagano Prefecture. Although I’m surprised to see that a third of the winning photos (2/6) come from Nagano, I really shouldn’t be — it is an exceedingly beautiful place.
Milky Way Central
A colorful examination of the center of our Milky Way galaxy:
In celebration of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, NASA’s Great Observatories — the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory — have collaborated to produce an unprecedented image of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy.
In this spectacular image, observations using infrared light and X-ray light see through the obscuring dust and reveal the intense activity near the galactic core. Note that the center of the galaxy is located within the bright white region to the right of and just below the middle of the image. The entire image width covers about one-half a degree, about the same angular width as the full moon.
Each telescope’s contribution is presented in a different color:
- Yellow represents the near-infrared observations of Hubble. These observations outline the energetic regions where stars are being born as well as reveal hundreds of thousands of stars.
- Red represents the infrared observations of Spitzer. The radiation and winds from stars create glowing dust clouds that exhibit complex structures from compact, spherical globules to long, stringy filaments.
- Blue and violet represent the X-ray observations of Chandra. X-rays are emitted by gas heated to millions of degrees by stellar explosions and by outflows from the supermassive black hole in the galaxy’s center. The bright blue blob on the left side is emission from a double star system containing either a neutron star or a black hole.
When these views are brought together, this composite image provides one of the most detailed views ever of our galaxy’s mysterious core.
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About Silver Rockets
This blog celebrates space exploration, human spaceflight and the heavens, through lots and lots ofimages.
My name is Danielle Signor, and I am a space cadet. STS-133 NASA Tweetup Attendee!
This is a blog, NOT A SHOP. Click the images for their source or purchase link, if available.
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