These photo composites come to us courtesy of astronaut Don Pettit, aboard the International Space Station. There’s a set of 18 on Flickr for your perusal.

Expedition 31 Flight Engineer Don Pettit relayed some information about photographic techniques used to achieve the images: “My star trail images are made by taking a time exposure of about 10 to 15 minutes. However, with modern digital cameras, 30 seconds is about the longest exposure possible, due to electronic detector noise effectively snowing out the image. To achieve the longer exposures I do what many amateur astronomers do. I take multiple 30-second exposures, then ‘stack’ them using imaging software, thus producing the longer exposure.”

Vincent van Gogh. (Dutch, 1853-1890). The Starry Night. Saint Rémy, June 1889. Oil on canvas, 29 x 36 1/4" (73.7 x 92.1 cm). On display at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City

I’m starting to dig through the archives here at Silver Rockets, as I’m discovering that a lot of my favorite things were posted toward the beginning when nobody was reading this blog. I’ll be starting a series of highlights and best-ofs, every so often, to bring some happy images back to the surface for your enjoyment.

First up is The Starry Night, one of my favorite paintings PERIOD. This was post #4 here, on July 4, 2006. (Long time, no see!) It was also my first masthead.

It came to mind the other day, while I was remembering this:

Danielle visits Starry Night! June 2011, NYC.

I saw a lot of neat things while I was in New York City last June (most of them sparkly, not spacey), but there are a few specific things that are especially vivid memories, and this is one of them. I could have sat and looked at The Starry Night for an hour, I bet. The colors are vibrant. The texture is incredible. It’s smaller than I’d imagined. Funny how that works. The Starry Night is smallish. The Lady of Shalott is GIGANTIC. Go figure.

I buzzed around MoMA briefly, taking in a roomful of Monet’s water lilies, Art Nouveau furniture and more, but kept gravitating back to the Starry Night room. I could hardly take my eyes off it! I firmly believe that art is best experienced in person, if possible. Even the best reproductions can’t capture that feeling. If you’re able to, I highly recommend paying Starry Night a visit! And don’t be afraid to get close! I got about a foot away, before getting the Eyeball from a guard. Beware the Eyeball.

Image Credit & Copyright: Leonardo Julio & Carlos Milovic (Astronomia Pampeana)

I doubt I could run out of beautiful space photos to share with you, dear reader, so I don’t mind posting two in a row!

Is this a painting or a photograph? In this beautiful celestial still life composed with a cosmic brush, dusty nebula NGC 2170 shines near the image center. Reflecting the light of nearby hot stars, NGC 2170 is joined by other bluish reflection nebulae, a red emission region, many dark absorption nebulae, and a backdrop of colorful stars. Like the common household items still life painters often choose for their subjects, the clouds of gas, dust, and hot stars pictured above are also commonly found in this setting – a massive, star-forming molecular cloud in the constellation of the Unicorn (Monoceros). The giant molecular cloud, Mon R2, is impressively close, estimated to be only 2,400 light-years or so away. At that distance, this canvas would be over 60 light-years across.

Chanel Etoile Filante bracelet in white gold, with diamonds.

I stumbled upon the new Chanel Comète line of jewelry, and found myself with an interesting conundrum: should I post starry jewelry on the starry blog (you are here), or the jewelry blog? My answer? BOTH.

To see more celestial jewelry, and read more about the collection, head over to Many Faceted!

This star cluster is beautiful, just like today is, and just like ten years ago was. Stars shine brightly!

To some, the outline of the open cluster of stars M6 resembles a butterfly. M6, also known as NGC 6405, spans about 20 light-years and lies about 2,000 light years distant. M6 can best be seen in a dark sky with binoculars towards the constellation of Scorpius, coving about as much of the sky as the full moon. Like other open clusters, M6 is composed predominantly of young blue stars, although the brightest star is nearly orange. M6 is estimated to be about 100 million years old. Determining the distance to clusters like M6 helps astronomers calibrate the distance scale of the universe.

Credit: ESO/WFI (visible); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A. Weiss et al. (microwave); NASA/CXC/CfA/R. Kraft et al. (X-ray); Inset: NASA/TANAMI/C. Müller et al. (radio)

Hubble unveiled some amazing time-lapse videos of supersonic jets released by young stars this week; above are some (scary) plasma jets shooting out of a galaxy. I don’t know what this has to do with Labor Day weekend, but here you go anyway. Enjoy.

Jets of streaming plasma expelled by the central black hole of a massive spiral galaxy light up this composite image of Centaurus A. The jets emanating from Cen A are over a million light years long. Exactly how the central black hole expels infalling matter is still unknown. After clearing the galaxy, however, the jets inflate large radio bubbles that likely glow for millions of years. If excited by a passing front, radio bubbles can even light up again after a billion years. X-ray light is depicted in the above composite image in blue, while microwave light is false-colored orange. The inset image in radio light shows newly imaged, never seen-before details of the innermost light year of the central jet.

Image Credit & Copyright: Gordon Mandell

And to think, all of these are just one clump in a star-filled sky…

Featured in this sharp telescopic image, globular star cluster Omega Centauri (NGC 5139) is some 15,000 light-years away. Some 150 light-years in diameter, the cluster is packed with about 10 million stars much older than the Sun. Omega Cen is the largest of 200 or so known globular clusters that roam the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Though most star clusters consist of stars with the same age and composition, the enigmatic Omega Cen exhibits the presence of different stellar populations with a spread of ages and chemical abundances. In fact, Omega Cen may be the remnant core of a small galaxy merging with the Milky Way.

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.

Credit: ESO, INAF-VST, OmegaCAM

This celestial image gets to be a post for having the words “star factory” in the title. I know that’s an accurate description of what’s happening, but I also like the mental image is concocts… a star factory. I’d like to tour the Star Factory, please. Please?

Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, the star factory known as Messier 17 lies some 5,500 light-years away in the nebula-rich constellation Sagittarius. At that distance, this degree wide field of view spans almost 100 light-years, courtesy of the European Southern Observatory’s new VLT Survey Telescope and OmegaCAM. The sharp, false color image includes both optical and infrared data, following faint details of the region’s gas and dust clouds against a backdrop of central Milky Way stars. Stellar winds and energetic light from hot, massive stars formed from M17′s stock of cosmic gas and dust have slowly carved away at the remaining interstellar material producing the cavernous appearance and undulating shapes. M17 is also known as the Omega Nebula or the Swan Nebula.

Credit & Copyright: Leonardo Julio (Astronomia Pampeana)

I love the colors in this: blues, browns against an almost-burgundy purple background. Lovely.

Cosmic dust clouds sprawl across a rich field of stars in this sweeping telescopic vista near the northern boundary of Corona Australis, the Southern Crown. Probably less than 500 light-years away and effectively blocking light from more distant, background stars in the Milky Way, the densest part of the dust cloud is about 8 light-years long. At its tip (upper right) is a group of lovely reflection nebulae cataloged as NGC 6726, 6727, 6729, and IC 4812. A characteristic blue color is produced as light from hot stars is reflected by the cosmic dust. The smaller yellowish nebula (NGC 6729) surrounds young variable star R Coronae Australis. Magnificent globular star cluster NGC 6723 is toward the upper right corner of the view. While NGC 6723 appears to be part of the group, it actually lies nearly 30,000 light-years away, far beyond the Corona Australis dust clouds.