Narrow Search
 
 
Advanced Search

Browse All : Camera 2 and Earth

Printer Friendly
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
1-50 of 314
     
     
Galaxy Triplet ARP 274
On April 1-2, the Hubble Spa …
4/6/09
Description On April 1-2, the Hubble Space Telescope photographed the winning target in the Space Telescope Science Institute's 'You Decide' competition in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy (IYA). The winner is a group of galaxies called Arp 274. The striking object received 67,021 votes out of the nearly 140,000 votes cast for the six candidate targets. Arp 274, also known as NGC 5679, is a system of three galaxies that appear to be partially overlapping in the image, although they may be at somewhat different distances. The spiral shapes of two of these galaxies appear mostly intact. The third galaxy (to the far left) is more compact, but shows evidence of star formation. Two of the three galaxies are forming new stars at a high rate. This is evident in the bright blue knots of star formation that are strung along the arms of the galaxy on the right and along the small galaxy on the left. The largest component is located in the middle of the three. It appears as a spiral galaxy, which may be barred. The entire system resides at about 400 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Virgo. Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 was used to image Arp 274. Blue, visible and infrared filters were combined with a filter that isolates hydrogen emission. The colors in this image reflect the intrinsic color of the different stellar populations that make up the galaxies. Yellowish older stars can be seen in the central bulge of each galaxy. A bright central cluster of stars pinpoint each nucleus. Younger blue stars trace the spiral arms, along with pinkish nebulae that are illuminated by new star formation. Interstellar dust is silhouetted against the starry population. A pair of foreground stars inside our own Milky Way are at far right. The International Year of Astronomy is the celebration of the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first observations with a telescope. People around the world came together to participate in the IYA's 100 Hours of Astronomy, April 2 to 5. This global astronomy event was geared toward encouraging as many people as possible to experience the night sky. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Date 4/6/09
SEASONAL CHANGES IN MARS' NO …
These images, which seem to …
Description These images, which seem to have been taken while NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was looking directly down on the Martian North Pole, were actually created by assembling mosaics of three sets of images taken by HST in October, 1996 and in January and March, 1997 and projecting them to appear as they would if seen from above the pole. This first mosaic is a view which could not actually be seen in nature because at this season a portion of the pole would have actually been in shadow, the last view, taken near the summer solstice, would correspond to the Midnight Sun on Earth with the pole fully illuminated all day. The resulting polar maps begin at 50 degrees N latitude and are oriented with 0 degrees longitude at the 12 o'clock position. This series of pictures captures the seasonal retreat of Mars' north polar cap. October 1996 (early spring in the Northern hemisphere): In this map, assembled from images obtained between Oct. 8 and 15, the cap extends down to 60 degrees N latitude, nearly it's maximum winter extent. (The notches are areas where Hubble data were not available). A thin, comma-shaped cloud of dust can be seen as a salmon-colored crescent at the 7 o'clock position. The cap is actually fairly circular about the geographic pole at this season, the bluish "knobs" where the cap seems to extend further are actually clouds that occurred near the edges of the three separate sets of images used to make the mosaic. January 1997 (mid-spring): Increased warming as spring progresses in the northern hemisphere has sublimated the carbon dioxide ice and frost below 70 degrees north latitude. The faint darker circle inside the cap boundary marks the location of circumpolar sand dunes (see March '97 map), these dark dunes are warmed more by solar heating than are the brighter surroundings, so the surface frost sublimates from the dunes earlier than from the neighboring areas. Particularly evident is the marked hexagonal shape of the polar cap at this season, noted previously by HST in 1995 and Mariner 9 in 1972, this may be due to topography, which isn't well known, or to wave structure in the circulation. This map was assembled from WFPC2 images obtained between Dec. 30, 1996 and Jan. 4, 1997. March 30, 1997 (early summer): The cap has fully retreated to its remnant core of water-ice. This residual cap is actually almost cut into two by a large, horn-shaped canyon called Chasma Borealis which is cut deeply into the polar terrain. The HST images also reveal a curious layered terrain which is evidence of past climatic changes on Mars. The sublimation of all of the carbon dioxide has exposed the ring of dark sand dunes which encircle the North Polar Cap. Outliers of ice persist south of the polar sand sea (between the 3 o'clock and 9 o'clock positions). The bright circular features at 3, 6, and 9 o'clock are ice-filled craters. All images were taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. The color is constructed from images taken in red (673 nm) , blue (410 nm) and green (502 nm) light. The resolution at the North Pole ranges from about 115 km/pixel in October '96 to about 45 km/pixel in March '97. Credit: Phil James (Univ. Toledo), Todd Clancy (Space Science Inst., Boulder, CO), Steve Lee (Univ. Colorado), and NASA
Hubble Follows the Rotation …
title Hubble Follows the Rotation of the Asteroid Vesta
description This is a NASA Hubble Space Telescope series of 24 images showing the full 5.34-hour rotation of the 325-mile diameter (525 kilometer) asteroid Vesta. Hubble resolves features as small as 50 miles across, allowing astronomers to map Vesta's geologically diverse terrain. The surface is a complex record of Vesta's four billion-year history. Features include ancient lava flows, and a gigantic impact basin that is so deep, it exposes the asteroid's subsurface, or mantle. This sequence was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 between November 28 and December 1, 1994, when Vesta was at a distance of 156 million miles from Earth. When combined with ground-based data, astronomers will be able to make the first geochemical map of Vesta's surface. *Image Credit*: B. Zellner (Georgia Southern University) and NASA
Hubble Captures Full View of …
title Hubble Captures Full View of Uranus's Rings on Edge
date 08.14.2007
description NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captures a rare view of the entire ring system of the planet Uranus, tilted edge-on to Earth. The rings were photographed with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on August 14, 2007. The edge-on rings appear as spikes above and below the planet. The rings cannot be seen running fully across the face of the planet because the bright glare of the planet has been blocked out in the HST photo (a small amount of residual glare appears as a fan-shaped image artifact, along with an edge between the exposure for the inner and outer rings). A much shorter color exposure of the planet has been photo-composited to show its size and position relative to the ring plane. Earthbound astronomers only see the rings' edge every 42 years as the planet follows a leisurely 84-year orbit about the Sun. However, the last time the rings were tilted edge-on to Earth astronomers didn't even know they existed. The fainter outer rings appear in the 2003 Hubble Space Telescope images, but were not noticed there until they were seen in the 2005 images and the previous ones were analyzed more carefully. Uranus has a total of 13 dusty rings. Credit: NASA [ http://www.nasa.gov/ ], ESA [ http://www.spacetelescope.org/ ], and M. Showalter (SETI Institute)
Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 Fra …
title Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 Fragments
date 05.17.1994
description Last panoramic mosaic of comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL-9) taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The comet had broken into 21 fragments, all of which impacted Jupiter in mid-July of 1994. This image was taken on 17 May 1994 through the red filter of the Wide-Field Planetary Camera 2. At this time, the comet was about 660 million km from Earth. The comet fragments stretch across 1.1 million km of space. (HST, STScI-PR94-26d) *Image Credit*: NASA
Hubble Spots Northern Hemisp …
title Hubble Spots Northern Hemispheric Clouds on Uranus
date 07.31.1997
description Using visible light, astronomers for the first time this century have detected clouds in the northern hemisphere of Uranus. The newest images, taken July 31 and Aug. 1, 1997 with NASA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, show banded structure and multiple clouds. Using these images, Dr. Heidi Hammel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and colleagues Wes Lockwood (Lowell Observatory) and Kathy Rages (NASA Ames Research Center) plan to measure the wind speeds in the northern hemisphere for the first time. Uranus is sometimes called the "sideways" planet, because its rotation axis tipped more than 90 degrees from the planet's orbit around the Sun. The "year" on Uranus lasts 84 Earth years, which creates extremely long seasons - winter in the northern hemisphere has lasted for nearly 20 years. Uranus has also been called bland and boring, because no clouds have been detectable in ground-based images of the planet. Even to the cameras of the Voyager spacecraft in 1986, Uranus presented a nearly uniform blank disk, and discrete clouds were detectable only in the southern hemisphere. Voyager flew over the planet's cloud tops near the dead of northern winter (when the northern hemisphere was completely shrouded in darkness). Spring has finally come to the northern hemisphere of Uranus. The newest images, both the visible-wavelength ones described here and those taken a few days earlier with the Near Infrared and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) by Erich Karkoschka (University of Arizona), show a planet with banded structure and detectable clouds. Two images are shown here. The "aqua" image (on the left) is taken at 5,470 Angstroms, which is near the human eye's peak response to wavelength. Color has been added to the image to show what a person on a spacecraft near Uranus might see. Little structure is evident at this wavelength, though with image-processing techniques, a small cloud can be seen near the planet's northern limb (rightmost edge). The "red" image (on the right) is taken at 6,190 Angstroms, and is sensitive to absorption by methane molecules in the planet's atmosphere. The banded structure of Uranus is evident, and the small cloud near the northern limb is now visible. Scientists are expecting that the discrete clouds and banded structure may become even more pronounced as Uranus continues in its slow pace around the Sun. "Some parts of Uranus haven't seen the Sun in decades," says Dr. Hammel, "and historical records suggest that we may see the development of more banded structure and patchy clouds as the planet's year progresses." Some scientists have speculated that the winds of Uranus are not symmetric around the planet's equator, but no clouds were visible to test those theories. The new data will provide the opportunity to measure the northern winds. Hammel and colleagues expect to have results soon. The Wide Field/Planetary Camera 2 was developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and managed by, the Goddard Spaced Flight Center for NASA's Office of Space Science. This image and other images and data received from the Hubble Space Telescope are posted on the World Wide Web on the Space Telescope Science Institute home page at URL http://oposite.stsci.edu *Image Credit*: Heidi Hammel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), NASA
Neptune's Stormy Disposition
title Neptune's Stormy Disposition
date 08.11.1998
description Using powerful ground-and space-based telescopes, scientists have obtained a moving look at some of the wildest, weirdest weather in the solar system. Combining simultaneous observations of Neptune made with the Hubble Space Telescope and NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, a team of scientists led by Lawrence A. Sromovsky of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has captured the most insightful images to date of a planet whose blustery weather -- monster storms and equatorial winds of 900 miles per hour -- bewilders scientists. The weather on Neptune, the eighth planet from the sun, is an enigma to begin with. The mechanism that drives its near-supersonic winds and giant storms has yet to be determined. On Earth, weather is driven by energy from the sun as it heats the atmosphere and oceans. On Neptune, the sun is 900 times dimmer and scientists have yet to understand how Neptune's weather-generating machinery can be so efficient. "It's an efficient weather machine compared to Earth," said Sromovsky. "It seems to run on almost no energy." In an effort to dissect the distant planet's atmosphere and monitor its bizarre weather, Sromovsky and his colleagues obtained a series of measurements and images over the span of three of Neptune's rotations. From those observations, Sromovsky said it is possible to measure Neptune's circulation and view a "strange menagerie of variable, discrete cloud features and zonal bands" of weather. Moreover, the new observations enabled Sromovsky's team to probe some of the deeper features of the atmosphere and to map Neptune's cloud tops. "We can show some clouds are higher than others, that altitudes vary," he said. Knowing something about the topography of Neptune's clouds, provides a direct way to measure Neptune's powerful winds. A looming mystery, he said, is the fate of huge dark spots, possibly giant storms. When the planetary probe Voyager visited Neptune in 1989, it detected the Great Dark Spot, a pulsating feature nearly the size of the Earth itself. Two years ago, Hubble observations showed the spot had disappeared, and that another, smaller spot had emerged. But instead of growing to a large-scale storm like the Great Dark Spot, the new spot appears to be trapped at a fixed latitude and may be declining in intensity, said Sromovsky, a senior scientist at UW-Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center. "They behave like storms, and the Great Dark Spot was an exaggerated features we haven't seen on any other planet. They seem to come and go, and rather than an exciting development of these dark spots, they dissipate." Another strange aspect of the distant planet's weather are distinct bands of weather that run parallel to the Neptunian equator. The weather bands encircle the planet and, in some respects, may be similar to the equatorial region of the Earth where tropical heat provides abundant energy to make clouds. "We can see regions of latitude where Neptune, consistently generates bright clouds," said Sromovsky. The regions are both above and below the planet's equator, but he added that it was uncertain what their explanation is in terms of atmospheric circulation. Sromovsky said that compared to the look provided by the Voyager spacecraft, Neptune is a different place: "The character of Neptune is different from what it was at the time of Voyager. The planet seems stable, yet different." Sromovsky's Hubble observations were made with Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer. The different instruments allowed observations to be made in a variety of wavelengths, each providing a different set of information about Neptune's clouds, their structures and how they circulate. *Image Credit*: NASA
Hubble Tracks Clouds on Uran …
title Hubble Tracks Clouds on Uranus
date 07.28.1997
description Taking its first peek at Uranus, NASA Hubble Space Telescope's Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) has detected six distinct clouds in images taken July 28,1997. The image on the right, taken 90 minutes after the left-hand image, shows the planet's rotation. Each image is a composite of three near-infrared images. They are called false-color images because the human eye cannot detect infrared light. Therefore, colors corresponding to visible light were assigned to the images. (The wavelengths for the "blue,""green," and "red" exposures are 1.1, 1.6, and 1.9 micrometers, respectively.) At visible and near-infrared light, sunlight is reflected from hazes and clouds in the atmosphere of Uranus. However, at near-infrared light, absorption by gases in the Uranian atmosphere limits the view to different altitudes, causing intense contrasts and colors. In these images, the blue exposure probes the deepest atmospheric levels. A blue color indicates clear atmospheric conditions, prevalent at mid-latitudes near the center of the disk. The green exposure is sensitive to absorption by methane gas, indicating a clear atmosphere, but in hazy atmospheric regions, the green color is seen because sunlight is reflected back before it is absorbed. The green color around the south pole (marked by "+") shows a strong local haze. The red exposure reveals absorption by hydrogen, the most abundant gas in the atmosphere of Uranus. Most sunlight shows patches of haze high in the atmosphere. A red color near the limb (edge) of the disk indicates the presence of a high-altitude haze. The purple color to the right of the equator also suggests haze high in the atmosphere with a clear atmosphere below. The five clouds visible near the right limb rotated counterclockwise during the time between both images. They reach high into the atmosphere, as indicated by their red color. Features of such high contrast have never been seen before on Uranus. The clouds are almost as large as continents on Earth, such as Europe. Another cloud (which barely can be seen) rotated along the path shown by the black arrow. It is located at lower altitudes, as indicated by its green color. The rings of Uranus are extremely faint in visible light but quite prominent in the near infrared. The brightest ring, the epsilon ring, has a variable width around its circumference. Its widest and thus brightest part is at the top in this image. Two fainter, inner rings are visible next to the epsilon ring. Eight of the 10 small Uranian satellites, discovered by Voyager 2, can be seen in both images. Their sizes range from about 25 miles (40 kilometers) for Bianca to 100 miles (150 kilometers) for Puck. The smallest of these satellites have not been detected since the departure of Voyager 2 from Uranus in 1986. These eight satellites revolve around Uranus in less than a day. The inner ones are faster than the outer ones. Their motion in the 90 minutes between both images is, marked in the right panel. The area outside the rings was slightly enhanced in brightness to improve the visibility of these faint satellites. The Wide Field/Planetary Camera 2 was developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and managed by the Goddard Spaced Flight Center for NASA's Office of Space Science. This image and other images and data received from the Hubble Space Telescope are posted on the World Wide Web on the Space Telescope Science Institute home page at URL http://oposite.stsci.edu/ *Image Credit*: NASA
Mars and Acidalia
Title Mars and Acidalia
Full Description Taking advantage of Mars's closest approach to Earth in eight years, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have taken the space- based observatory's sharpest views yet of the Red Planet. The telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 snapped these images between April 27 and May 6, when Mars was 54 million miles (87 million kilometers) from Earth. From this distance the telescope could see Martian features as small as 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide. The telescope obtained four images, which, together, show the entire planet. Each view depicts the planet as it completes one quarter of its daily rotation. In these views the north polar cap is tilted toward the Earth and is visible prominently at the top of each picture. The images were taken in the middle of the Martian northern summer, when the polar cap had shrunk to its smallest size. During this season the Sun shines continuously on the polar cap. Previous telescopic and spacecraft observations have shown that this summertime "residual" polar cap is composed of water ice, just like Earth's polar caps. These Hubble telescope snapshots reveal that substantial changes in the bright and dark markings on Mars have occurred in the 20 years since the NASA Viking spacecraft missions first mapped the planet. The Martian surface is dynamic and ever changing. Some regions that were dark 20 years ago are now bright red, some areas that were bright red are now dark. Winds move sand and dust from region to region, often in spectacular dust storms. Over long timescales many of the larger bright and dark markings remain stable, but smaller details come and go as they are covered and then uncovered by sand and dust. This image is centered near the location of the Pathfinder landing site. Dark sand dunes that surround the polar cap merge into a large, dark region called Acidalia. This area, as shown by images from the Hubble telescope and other spacecraft, is composed of dark, sand-sized grains of pulverized volcanic rock. Below and to the left of Acidalia are the massive Martian canyon systems of Valles Marineris, some of which form long linear markings that were once thought by some to be canals. Early morning clouds can be seen along the left limb of the planet, and a large cyclonic storm composed of water ice is churning near the polar cap.
Date 06/30/1999
NASA Center Hubble Space Telescope Center
Mars and Elysium
Title Mars and Elysium
Full Description Taking advantage of Mars's closest approach to Earth in eight years, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have taken the space- based observatory's sharpest views yet of the Red Planet. The telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 snapped these images between April 27 and May 6, when Mars was 54 million miles (87 million kilometers) from Earth. From this distance the telescope could see Martian features as small as 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide. The telescope obtained these four images, which, together, show the entire planet. Each view depicts the planet as it completes one quarter of its daily rotation. In these views the north polar cap is tilted toward the Earth and is visible prominently at the top of each picture. The images were taken in the middle of the Martian northern summer, when the polar cap had shrunk to its smallest size. During this season the Sun shines continuously on the polar cap. Previous telescopic and spacecraft observations have shown that this summertime "residual" polar cap is composed of water ice, just like Earth's polar caps. These Hubble telescope snapshots reveal that substantial changes in the bright and dark markings on Mars have occurred in the 20 years since the NASA Viking spacecraft missions first mapped the planet. The Martian surface is dynamic and ever changing. Some regions that were dark 20 years ago are now bright red, some areas that were bright red are now dark. Winds move sand and dust from region to region, often in spectacular dust storms. Over long timescales many of the larger bright and dark markings remain stable, but smaller details come and go as they are covered and then uncovered by sand and dust. This image is centered near another volcanic region known as Elysium. This area shows many small, dark markings that have been observed by the Hubble telescope and other spacecraft to change as a result of the movement of sand and dust across the Martian surface. In the upper left of this image, at high northern latitudes, a large chevron-shaped area of water ice clouds mark a storm front. Along the right limb, a large cloud system has formed around the Olympus Mons volcano.
Date 06/30/1999
NASA Center Hubble Space Telescope Center
Mars and Syrtis Major
Title Mars and Syrtis Major
Full Description Taking advantage of Mars's closest approach to Earth in eight years, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have taken the space- based observatory's sharpest views yet of the Red Planet. The telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 snapped these images between April 27 and May 6, when Mars was 54 million miles (87 million kilometers) from Earth. From this distance the telescope could see Martian features as small as 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide. The telescope obtained four images, which, together, show the entire planet. Each view depicts the planet as it completes one quarter of its daily rotation. In these views the north polar cap is tilted toward the Earth and is visible prominently at the top of each picture. The images were taken in the middle of the Martian northern summer, when the polar cap had shrunk to its smallest size. During this season the Sun shines continuously on the polar cap. Previous telescopic and spacecraft observations have shown that this summertime "residual" polar cap is composed of water ice, just like Earth's polar caps. These Hubble telescope snapshots reveal that substantial changes in the bright and dark markings on Mars have occurred in the 20 years since the NASA Viking spacecraft missions first mapped the planet. The Martian surface is dynamic and ever changing. Some regions that were dark 20 years ago are now bright red, some areas that were bright red are now dark. Winds move sand and dust from region to region, often in spectacular dust storms. Over long timescales many of the larger bright and dark markings remain stable, but smaller details come and go as they are covered and then uncovered by sand and dust. The dark feature known as Syrtis Major was first seen telescopically by the astronomer Christiaan Huygens in the 17th century. Many small, dark, circular impact craters can be seen in this region, attesting to the Hubble telescope's ability to reveal fine detail on the planet's surface. To the south of Syrtis is a large circular feature called Hellas. Viking and more recently Mars Global Surveyor have revealed that Hellas is a large and deep impact crater. These Hubble telescope pictures show it to be filled with surface frost and water ice clouds. Along the right limb, late afternoon clouds have formed around the volcano Elysium.
Date 06/30/1999
NASA Center Hubble Space Telescope Center
Mars and Tharsis
Title Mars and Tharsis
Full Description Taking advantage of Mars's closest approach to Earth in eight years, astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have taken the space- based observatory's sharpest views yet of the Red Planet. The telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 snapped these images between April 27 and May 6, when Mars was 54 million miles (87 million kilometers) from Earth. From this distance the telescope could see Martian features as small as 12 miles (19 kilometers) wide. The telescope obtained four images, which together show the entire planet. Each view depicts the planet as it completes one quarter of its daily rotation. In these views the north polar cap is tilted toward the Earth and is visible prominently at the top of each picture. The images were taken in the middle of the Martian northern summer, when the polar cap had shrunk to its smallest size. During this season the Sun shines continuously on the polar cap. Previous telescopic and spacecraft observations have shown that this summertime "residual" polar cap is composed of water ice, just like Earth's polar caps. These Hubble telescope snapshots reveal that substantial changes in the bright and dark markings on Mars have occurred in the 20 years since the NASA Viking spacecraft missions first mapped the planet. The Martian surface is dynamic and ever changing. Some regions that were dark 20 years ago are now bright red, some areas that were bright red are now dark. Winds move sand and dust from region to region, often in spectacular dust storms. Over long timescales many of the larger bright and dark markings remain stable, but smaller details come and go as they are covered and then uncovered by sand and dust. This image is centered on the region of the planet known as Tharsis, home of the largest volcanoes in the solar system. The bright, ring- like feature just to the left of center is the volcano Olympus Mons, which is more than 340 miles (550 kilometers) across and 17 miles (27 kilometers) high. Thick deposits of fine-grained, windblown dust cover most of this hemisphere. The colors indicate that the dust is heavily oxidized ("rusted"), and millions (or perhaps billions) of years of dust storms have homogenized its composition. Prominent late afternoon clouds along the right limb of the planet can be seen.
Date 06/30/1999
NASA Center Hubble Space Telescope Center
N81 in the Small Magellanic …
Title N81 in the Small Magellanic Cloud
Full Description A NASA Hubble Space Telescope "family portrait" of young, ultra-bright stars nested in their embryonic cloud of glowing gases. The celestial maternity ward, called N81, is located 200,000 light-years away in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), a small irregular satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. Hubble's exquisite resolution allows astronomers to pinpoint 50 separate stars tightly packed in the nebula's core within a 10 light- year diameter - slightly more than twice the distance between earth and the nearest star to our sun. The closest pair of stars is only 1/3 of a light-year apart (0.3 arcseconds in the sky). This furious rate of mass loss from these super-hot stars is evident in the Hubble picture that reveals dramatic shapes sculpted in the nebula's wall of glowing gases by violent stellar winds and shock waves. A pair of bright stars in the center of the nebula is pouring out most of the ultraviolet radiation to make the nebula glow. Just above them, a small dark knot is all that is left of the cold cloud of molecular hydrogen and dust the stars were born from. Dark absorption lanes of residual dust trisect the nebula. The nebula offers a unique opportunity for a close-up glimpse at the firestorm' accompanying the birth of extremely massive stars, each blazing with the brilliance of 300,000 of our suns. Such galactic fireworks were much more common billions of years ago in the early universe, when most star formation took place. The "natural- color" view was assembled from separate images taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, in ultraviolet light and two narrow emission lines of ionized Hydrogen (H-alpha, H-beta).
Date 09/24/1997
NASA Center Hubble Space Telescope Center
Peering into the Heart of th …
Title Peering into the Heart of the Crab Nebula
Full Description In the year 1054 A.D., Chinese astronomers were startled by the appearance of a new star, so bright that it was visible in broad daylight for several weeks. Today, the Crab Nebula is visible at the site of the "Guest Star." Located about 6,500 light-years from Earth, the Crab Nebula is the remnant of a star that began its life with about 10 times the mass of our own Sun. Its life ended on July 4, 1054 when it exploded as a supernova. In this image, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has zoomed in on the center of the Crab to reveal its structure with unprecedented detail. The Crab Nebula data were obtained by Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 in 1995. Images taken with five different color filters have been combined to construct this new false-color picture. Resembling an abstract painting by Jackson Pollack, the image shows ragged shards of gas that are expanding away from the explosion site at over 3 million miles per hour. The core of the star has survived the explosion as a pulsar, visible in the Hubble image as the lower of the two moderately bright stars to the upper left of center. The pulsar is a neutron star that spins on its axis 30 times a second. It heats its surroundings, creating the ghostly diffuse bluish-green glowing gas cloud in its vicinity, including a blue arc just to its right. The colorful network of filaments is the material from the outer layers of the star that was expelled during the explosion. The picture is somewhat deceptive in that the filaments appear to be close to the pulsar. In reality, the yellowish green filaments toward the bottom of the image are closer to us, and approaching at some 300 miles per second. The orange and pink filaments toward the top of the picture include material behind the pulsar, rushing away from us at similar speeds. The various colors in the picture arise from different chemical elements in the expanding gas, including hydrogen (orange), nitrogen (red), sulfur (pink), and oxygen (green). The shades of color represent variations in the temperature and density of the gas, as well as changes in the elemental composition. Kris Davidson (U. Minn.) led the research team of William P. Blair (JHU), Robert A. Fesen (Dartmouth), Alan Uomoto (JHU), Gordon M. MacAlpine (U. Mich.), and Richard B.C. Henry (U. Okla.) in the collection of the HST data. The Hubble Heritage Team created the color image from black and white data processed by Dr. Blair.
Date 06/01/2000
NASA Center Hubble Space Telescope Center
Butterfly Nebula
Title Butterfly Nebula
Full Description The Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) is back at work, capturing this image of the "butterfly wing"- shaped nebula, NGC 2346. The nebula is about 2,000 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Monoceros. It represents the spectacular "last gasp" of a binary star system at the nebula's center. The image was taken on March 6, 1997 as part of the recommissioning of the Hubble Space Telescope's previously installed scientific instruments following the successful servicing of the HST by NASA shuttle astronauts in February. WFPC2 was installed in HST during the servicing mission in 1993. At the center of the nebula lies a pair of stars that are so close together that they orbit around each other every 16 days. This is so close that, even with Hubble, the pair of stars cannot be resolved into its two components. One component of this binary is the hot core of a star that has ejected most of its outer layers, producing the surrounding nebula. Astronomers believe that this star, when it evolved and expanded to become a red giant, actually swallowed its companion star in an act of stellar cannibalism. The resulting interaction led to a spiraling together of the two stars, culminating in ejection of the outer layers of the red giant. Most of the outer layers were ejected into a dense disk, which can still be seen in the Hubble image, surrounding the central star. Later the hot star developed a fast stellar wind. This wind, blowing out into the surrounding disk, has inflated the large, wispy hourglass-shaped wings perpendicular to the disk. These wings produce the butterfly appearance when seen in projection. The total diameter of the nebula is about one-third of a light-year, or 2 trillion miles.
Date 03/06/1997
NASA Center Hubble Space Telescope Center
Cometary Knots Around A Dyin …
Title Cometary Knots Around A Dying Star
Full Description These gigantic, tadpole-shaped objects are probably the result of a dying star's last gasps. Dubbed "cometary knots" because their glowing heads and gossamer tails resemble comets, the gaseous objects probably were formed during a star's final stages of life. Hubble astronomer C. Robert O'Dell and graduate student Kerry P. Handron of Rice University in Houston, Texas discovered thousands of these knots with the Hubble Space Telescope while exploring the Helix nebula, the closest planetary nebula to Earth at 450 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. Although ground-based telescopes have revealed such objects, astronomers have never seen so many of them. The most visible knots all lie along the inner edge of the doomed star's ring, trillions of miles away from the star's nucleus. Although these gaseous knots appear small, they're actually huge. Each gaseous head is at least twice the size of our solar system, each tail stretches for 100 billion miles, about 1,000 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Astronomers theorize that the doomed star spews hot, lower-density gas from its surface, which collides with cooler, higher-density gas that had been ejected 10,000 years before. The crash fragments the smooth cloud surrounding the star into smaller, denser finger-like droplets, like dripping paint. This image was taken in August, 1994 with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. The red light depicts nitrogen emission ([NII] 6584A), green, hydrogen (H-alpha, 6563A), and blue, oxygen (5007A).
Date 08/01/1994
NASA Center Hubble Space Telescope Center
Fireworks of Star Formation …
Title Fireworks of Star Formation Light Up a Galaxy
Full Description Located some 13 million light-years from Earth, NGC 4214 is currently forming clusters of new stars from its interstellar gas and dust. In this Hubble image, we can see a sequence of steps in the formation and evolution of stars and star clusters. The picture was created from exposures taken in several color filters with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. NGC 4214 contains a multitude of faint stars covering most of the frame, but the picture is dominated by filigreed clouds of glowing gas surrounding bright stellar clusters. The youngest of these star clusters are located at the lower right of the picture, where they appear as about half a dozen bright clumps of glowing gas. Young, hot stars have a whitish to bluish color in the Hubble image, because of their high surface temperatures, ranging from 10,000 up to about 50,000 degrees Celsius. The radiation and wind forces from the young stars literally blow bubbles in the gas. Over millions of years, the bubbles increase in size as the stars inside them grow older. Moving to the lower left from the youngest clusters, we find an older star cluster, around which a gas bubble has inflated to the point that there is an obvious cavity around the central cluster. The most spectacular feature in the Hubble picture lies near the center of NGC 4214. This object is a cluster of hundreds of massive blue stars, each of them more than 10,000 times brighter than our own Sun. A vast heart-shaped bubble, inflated by the combined stellar winds and radiation pressure, surrounds the cluster. The expansion of the bubble is augmented as the most massive stars in the center reach the ends of their lives and explode as supernovae. The principal astronomers are: John MacKenty, Jesus Maiz-Apellaniz (Space Telescope Science Institute), Colin Norman (Johns Hopkins University), Nolan Walborn (Space Telescope Science Institute), Richard Burg (Johns Hopkins University), Richard Griffiths (Carnegie Mellon University), and Rosemary Wyse (Johns Hopkins University).
Date 01/06/2000
NASA Center Hubble Space Telescope Center
Galactic Silhouettes
Title Galactic Silhouettes
Full Description This new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and its Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) shows the unique galaxy pair called NGC 3314. Through an extraordinary chance alignment, a face-on spiral galaxy lies precisely in front of another larger spiral. This line-up provides us with the rare chance to visualize dark material within the front galaxy, seen only because it is silhouetted against the object behind it. Dust lying in the spiral arms of the foreground galaxy stands out where it absorbs light from the more distant galaxy. This silhouetting shows us where the interstellar dust clouds are located, and how much light they absorb. The outer spiral arms of the front galaxy appear to change from bright to dark, as they are projected first against deep space, and then against the bright background of the other galaxy. NGC 3314 lies about 140 million light-years from Earth, in the direction of the southern hemisphere constellation Hydra. The bright blue stars forming a pinwheel shape near the center of the front galaxy have formed recently from interstellar gas and dust. A small, red patch near the center of the image is the bright nucleus of the background galaxy, NGC 3314b. It is reddened for the same reason the setting sun looks red. When light passes through a volume containing small particles (molecules in the Earth's atmosphere or interstellar dust particles in galaxies), its color becomes redder. The Hubble Heritage color image of NGC 3314 was constructed from archival images taken with WFPC2 in April 1999 by Drs. William Keel and Ray White III (University of Alabama) in blue and infrared light, combined with new images obtained by the Heritage team in March 2000 using blue, green and red filters.
Date 05/11/2000
NASA Center Hubble Space Telescope Center
Giant Twisters in the Lagoon …
Title Giant Twisters in the Lagoon Nebula
Full Description This NASA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image reveals a pair of one-half light-year long interstellar "twisters," eerie funnels and twisted-rope structures in the heart of the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8) which lies 5,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. The central hot star, O Herschel 36 (lower right), is the primary source of the ionizing radiation for the brightest region in the nebula, called the Hourglass. Analogous to the spectacular phenomena of Earth tornadoes, the large difference in temperature between the hot surface and cold interior of the clouds, combined with the pressure of starlight, may produce strong horizontal shear to twist the clouds into their tornado-like appearance. Though the spiral shapes suggest the clouds are "twisting," future observations will be needed, perhaps with Hubble's next generation instruments, with the spectroscopic capabilities of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) or the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), to actually measure velocities. These color-coded images are the combination of individual exposures taken in July and September, 1995 with Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) through three narrow-band filters (red light ionized sulphur atoms, blue light, double ionized oxygen atoms, green light, ionized hydrogen).
Date 09/27/1995
NASA Center Hubble Space Telescope Center
The Reflection Nebula in Ori …
Title The Reflection Nebula in Orion
Full Description Just weeks after NASA astronauts repaired the Hubble Space Telescope in December 1999, the Hubble Heritage Project snapped this picture of NGC 1999, a nebula in the constellation Orion. The Heritage astronomers, in collaboration with scientists in Texas and Ireland, used Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) to obtain the color image. NGC 1999 is an example of a reflection nebula. Like fog around a street lamp, a reflection nebula shines only because the light from an imbedded source illuminates its dust, the nebula does not emit any visible light of its own. NGC 1999 lies close to the famous Orion Nebula, about 1,500 light-years from Earth, in a region of our Milky Way galaxy where new stars are being formed actively. NGC 1999 was discovered some two centuries ago by Sir William Herschel and his sister Caroline, and was cataloged later in the 19th century as object 1999 in the New General Catalogue. This data was collected in January 2000 by the Hubble Heritage Team with the collaboration of star-formation experts C. Robert O'Dell (Rice University), Thomas P. Ray (Dublin Institute for Advanced Study), and David Corcoran (University of Limerick).
Date 03/02/2000
NASA Center Hubble Space Telescope Center
The Ring Nebula
Title The Ring Nebula
Full Description The NASA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the sharpest view yet of the most famous of all planetary nebulae, the Ring Nebula (M57). In this October 1998 image, the telescope has looked down a barrel of gas cast off by a dying star thousands of years ago. This photo reveals elongated dark clumps of material embedded in the gas at the edge of the nebula, the dying central star floating in a blue haze of hot gas. The nebula is about a light-year in diameter and is located some 2,000 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Lyra. The colors are approximately true colors. The color image was assembled from three black-and-white photos taken through different color filters with the Hubble telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. Blue isolates emission from very hot helium, which is located primarily close to the hot central star. Green represents ionized oxygen, which is located farther from the star. Red shows ionized nitrogen, which is radiated from the coolest gas, located farthest from the star. The gradations of color illustrate how the gas glows because it is bathed in ultraviolet radiation from the remnant central star, whose surface temperature is a white-hot 216,000 degrees Fahrenheit (120,000 degrees Celsius).
Date 10/01/1998
NASA Center Hubble Space Telescope Center
Hubble Reopens Eye on the Un …
Title Hubble Reopens Eye on the Universe
Full Description In its first glimpse of the heavens following the successful December 1999 servicing mission, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured a majestic view of a planetary nebula, the glowing remains of a dying, Sun-like star. This stellar relic, first spied by William Herschel in 1787, is nicknamed the "Eskimo" Nebula (NGC 2392) because, when viewed through ground-based telescopes, it resembles a face surrounded by a fur parka. In this Hubble telescope image, the "parka" is really a disk of material embellished with a ring of comet-shaped objects, with their tails streaming away from the central, dying star. The Eskimo's "face" also contains some fascinating details. Although this bright central region resembles a ball of twine, it is, in reality, a bubble of material being blown into space by the central star's intense "wind" of high-speed material. In this photo, one bubble lies in front of the other, obscuring part of the second lobe. Scientists believe that a ring of dense material around the star's equator, ejected during its red giant phase, created the nebula's shape. 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. Scientists are still puzzled about the origin of the comet-shaped features in the "parka." One possible explanation is that these objects formed from a collision of slow-and fast-moving gases. The Eskimo Nebula is about 5,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Gemini. The picture was taken Jan. 10 and 11, 2000, with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2. The nebula's glowing gases produce the colors in this image: nitrogen (red), hydrogen (green), oxygen (blue), and helium (violet).
Date 01/24/2000
NASA Center Hubble Space Telescope Center
Light and Shadow in the Cari …
Title Light and Shadow in the Carina Nebula
Full Description Previously unseen details of a mysterious, complex structure within the Carina Nebula (NGC 3372) are revealed by this image of the "Keyhole Nebula," obtained with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The picture is a montage assembled from four different April 1999 telescope pointings with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2, which used six different color filters. The picture is dominated by a large, approximately circular feature, which is part of the Keyhole Nebula, named in the 19th century by Sir John Herschel. This region, about 8000 light-years from Earth, is located adjacent to the famous explosive variable star Eta Carinae, which lies just outside the field of view toward the upper right. The high resolution of the Hubble images reveals the relative three- dimensional locations of many of these features, as well as showing numerous small dark globules that may be in the process of collapsing to form new stars. Two striking large, sharp-edged dust clouds are located near the bottom center and upper left edges of the image. The former is immersed within the ring and the latter is just outside the ring. The pronounced pillars and knobs of the upper left cloud appear to point toward a luminous, massive star located just outside the field further toward the upper left, which may be responsible for illuminating and sculpting them by means of its high-energy radiation and stellar wind of high-velocity ejected material. These large dark clouds may eventually evaporate, or if there are sufficiently dense condensations within them, give birth to small star clusters. The Carina Nebula, with an overall diameter of more than 200 light- years, is one of the outstanding features of the Southern Hemisphere portion of the Milky Way. The diameter of the Keyhole ring structure shown here is about 7 light-years. These data were collected by the Hubble Heritage Team and Nolan R. Walborn (STScI), Rodolfo H. Barba' (La Plata Observatory, Argentina), and Adeline Caulet (France).
Date 02/03/2000
NASA Center Hubble Space Telescope Center
A Second Look: Replacing the …
Title A Second Look: Replacing the Wide Field and Planetary Camera
Description Astronauts remove the Wide Field and Planetary Camera to replace it with its more powerful successor, Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, during Hubble?s first servicing mission in 1993. The camera, shaped something like a grand piano, weighs 610 pounds (277 kg) on Earth, but nothing in space. It can detect stars a billion times fainter than the ones we can see with our eyes. Most of Hubble?s most popular pictures have been taken with this second camera.
Hubble Observes the Moons an …
Title Hubble Observes the Moons and Rings of the Planet Uranus
Hubble Observes the Moons an …
Title Hubble Observes the Moons and Rings of the Planet Uranus
Hubble Floating Free
Title Hubble Floating Free
Description The Hubble Space Telescope floats against the background of Earth after a week of repair and upgrade by Space Shuttle Columbia astronauts in 2002. Hubble?s fourth servicing mission gave the telescope its first new instrument installed since the 1997 repair mission ? the Advanced Camera for Surveys. It doubled Hubble?s field of view and records information much faster than Hubble?s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2.
Hubble Sheds Light on the "F …
Title Hubble Sheds Light on the "Faint Blue Galaxy" Mystery
Hubble Views Saturn Ring-Pla …
Title Hubble Views Saturn Ring-Plane Crossing
Hubble Image of Comet Shoema …
Title Hubble Image of Comet Shoemaker-Levy First Fragment Impact With Jupiter
Hubble Views Saturn Ring-Pla …
Title Hubble Views Saturn Ring-Plane Crossing
Astronomers View Comet Impac …
Title Astronomers View Comet Impact with Jupiter
Hubble Provides the First Im …
Title Hubble Provides the First Images of Saturn's Aurorae
Hubble Confirms Abundance of …
Title Hubble Confirms Abundance of Protoplanetary Disks around Newborn Stars
Hubble Observes A New Saturn …
Title Hubble Observes A New Saturn Storm
Hubble Monitors Weather on N …
Title Hubble Monitors Weather on Neighboring Planets
Hubble Finds Thousands of Ga …
Title Hubble Finds Thousands of Gaseous Fragments Surrounding a Dying Star
Hubble's Close-Up View of a …
Title Hubble's Close-Up View of a Shock Wave from a Stellar Explosion
Hubble Tracks Jupiter Storms
Title Hubble Tracks Jupiter Storms
Hubble Follows Rapid Changes …
Title Hubble Follows Rapid Changes in Jupiter's Aurora
Hubble Space Telescope Obser …
Title Hubble Space Telescope Observations of Neptune
Hubble Views Saturn Ring-Pla …
Title Hubble Views Saturn Ring-Plane Crossing
Hubble Discovers New Dark Sp …
Title Hubble Discovers New Dark Spot on Neptune
Hubble Sees Early Building B …
Title Hubble Sees Early Building Blocks of Today's Galaxies
Hubble Observes the Fire and …
Title Hubble Observes the Fire and Fury of a Stellar Birth
Rare Hubble Portrait of Io a …
Title Rare Hubble Portrait of Io and Jupiter
Hubble Discovers New Dark Sp …
Title Hubble Discovers New Dark Spot on Neptune
Giant "Twisters" and Star Wi …
Title Giant "Twisters" and Star Wisps in the Lagoon Nebula
Giant "Twisters" and Star Wi …
Title Giant "Twisters" and Star Wisps in the Lagoon Nebula
Hubble Records a Black Hole' …
Title Hubble Records a Black Hole's Signature
General Information What is an Early Release Observation? A photograph of a celestial object that demonstrates the performance of a new Hubble camera. The colorful "zigzag" on the right is not the work of a flamboyant artist, but the signature of a super-massive black hole in the center of galaxy M84, discovered by the Hubble telescope's imaging spectrograph. The image on the left, also taken by Hubble, shows the core of the galaxy where the suspected black hole dwells. In a single exposure, astronomers mapped the motions of gas in the grip of the black hole's powerful gravitational pull by aligning Hubble's spectroscopic slit across the nucleus.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
1-50 of 314