Aurora On Saturn.

Holiday Lights from the Universe

Although there are no seasons in space, some cosmic vistas invoke thoughts of a frosty winter landscape. Here are a few stellar images of holiday wonderlands from across the galaxy…

Located in our galaxy about 5,500 light years from Earth, this region is actually a “cluster of clusters,” containing at least three clusters of young stars, including many hot, massive, luminous stars.

The outstretched “wings” of this nebula looks like a soaring, celestial snow angel. Twin lobes of super-hot gas, glowing blue in this image, stretch outward from the central star. This hot gas creates the “wings” of our angel. A ring of dust and gas orbiting the star acts like a belt, clinching the expanding nebula into an “hourglass” shape.

At this time of year, holiday parties often include festive lights. When galaxies get together, they also may be surrounded by a spectacular light show. This pair of spiral galaxies has been caught in a grazing encounter. This region has hosted three supernova explosions in the past 15 years and has produced one of the most bountiful collections of super-bright X-ray lights known.

What do the following things have in common: a cone, the fur of a fox and a Christmas tree? Answer: they all occur in the constellation of the unicorn (Monoceros). Pictured as a star forming region, the complex jumble of cosmic gas and dust is about 2,700 light-years away.

Resembling festive lights on a holiday wreath, this Hubble Space Telescope image of a nearby spiral galaxy is an iconic reminder of the impending season. Bright knots of glowing gas light up the spiral arms, indicating a rich environment of star formation.

The Hubble Space Telescope captured two festive-looking nebulas, situated so as to appear as one. Intense radiation from the brilliant central stars is heating hydrogen in each of the nebulas, causing them to glow red…like a holiday light.

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Callisto, Jupiter’s heavily-cratered Galilean moon that’s around 99% as large as Mercury but only a third as massive, bears a striking resemblance to that planet.

via reddit

HCG 87: A Small Group of Galaxies : Sometimes galaxies form groups. For example, our own Milky Way Galaxy is part of the Local Group of Galaxies. Small, compact groups, like Hickson Compact Group 87 shown above, are interesting partly because they slowly self-destruct. Indeed, the galaxies of HCG 87 are gravitationally stretching each other during their 100-million year orbits around a common center. The pulling creates colliding gas that causes bright bursts of star formation and feeds matter into their active galaxy centers. HCG 87 is composed of a large edge-on spiral galaxy visible near the image center, an elliptical galaxy visible to its right, and a spiral galaxy visible near the top. The small spiral near the center might be far in the distance. Several stars from our Galaxy are also visible in the foreground. Studying groups like HCG 87 allows insight into how all galaxies form and evolve. via NASA

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A stellar fingerprint - an emission-line star known as IRAS 12196-6300

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At the Heart of Orion.

The planet Saturn, observed by the Hubble Space Telescope.

View of Neptune in the infrared, showing bands of methane in its atmosphere captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, this image is surrounded by four of its satellites, Proteus, Larissa, Despina and Galatea.

Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble

The moon occluding the sun during an eclipse. The fine threads you can see are part of the solar corona, and actually titanic spools of ultra-hot plasma, curling and bending with the sun’s complex magnetic field.

TODAY IN HISTORY: Planet Neptune is observed by the Voyager 2 space probe on August 24, 1989. (via)

Moon and Venus by frankastro