46 Billion Pixels of the Universe

192 Gigabytes.  One picture.  And I thought the 4 GB Andromeda shot was impressive (okay it still is). But this shot of the Milky Way, the largest single astronomical image ever compiled, is truly staggering in its detail.  Showing multiple images taken with different filters, the massive compilation is the culmination of a 5-year observing program by the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. It’s amazing how much detail is shown, as you zoom in across the different features and truly get a sense for the magnitude of our Galaxy, and for the massive population of stars. I have yet to find a way to...

A Very Recent Explosion Still Ongoing

About 170 years ago, a star nearly exploded in the Southern constellation Carina.  I say nearly for a few reasons.  On Earth, observers saw a dim, seemingly-average star become the second brightest star in the night sky.  It stayed that way for 20 years before slowly fading. When we looked at it with telescopes, we found that whatever happened to Eta Carinae, it ejected more than 30 times the mass of our Sun in that short twenty year period, creating what we now call the homunculus nebula. Eta Carinae is a multiple star system 7500 light years away from Earth, so rest assured any...