By Dani

NGC 2070 // 30 Doradus // Tarantula Nebula

Dark Castle // Per Lindberg

Humboldt’s Distribution of Plants in Equinoctial America by Alexander von Humboldt (1841)

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by: Rishad

Hubble Reveals The Beauty And Mystery Of Saturn’s Rings

“Right now, in Earth’s skies, Saturn appears at its biggest and brightest. Just look to the southeastern skies (from the northern hemisphere), slightly east of bright Jupiter. With Earth between the Sun and Saturn, it’s poised for spectacular viewing. But the true star of Saturn is its main rings, now tilted for excellent views.”

I wish we had a dedicated mission, constantly, for each of the outer planets. There’s so much out there to explore and learn about, and there’s no view like the view from actually being there. But in the absence of that, the Hubble Space Telescope is a very, very pleasing consolation prize, capable of imaging these worlds every year at incredible resolution, even from over a billion kilometers away.

Take a look at these views of Saturn, and marvel at the incredible ring system. If you want to see it for yourself, now’s the perfect time!

1995, picture by Enver Hirsch

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has released a beautiful new image of the open star cluster Messier 7.  This new view of a middle-aged star cluster (also known as “M7”) comes in the form of an ESO photo release.  Using the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile, the image was taken with the Wide-Field Imager and shows a window of sky about 1° across, or twice as wide as a full Moon. The cluster stars are the big, (mostly) blue ones in the foreground, about 1000 light years away; the thousands of other, fainter stars are many times more distant as the line of sight in this view is one of the most dense through our Galaxy’s disk.  

At 200 million years old, Messier 7 is a snapshot in the middle of the evolution of a typical star cluster: the gas and dust from which the stars formed are long gone, but the resulting stars are still near each other in space.  The blue stars are evolving rapidly and will be the first to disappear, while the longer-lived cluster stars will slowly drift apart over the next billion years or so.  According to the photo release, “As they age, the brightest stars in the picture — a population of up to a tenth of the total stars in the cluster — will violently explode as supernovae. Looking further into the future, the remaining faint stars, which are much more numerous, will slowly drift apart until they become no longer recognisable as a cluster.”