Not to be confused with Canadian Gum Hubba-Bubba, Hubble has released a great birthday image for it’s 26th birthday. I’m a few days late to celebrate, but it’s still a beautiful image. Known as NGC 7653, the Bubble nebula is 8,000 light years distant in the constellation of Cassiopeia. The reason for this natural bubble shape is that the star just left of center in the image is ionizing a surrounding cloud of Hydrogen with it’s powerful stellar wind. As electrons and protons recombine at the edges of the bubble, they release an infrared photon that can be clearly seen...
I’ve spent the last couple of days as a zombie due to the time change, but now that I feel like myself, I’ve got some catch-up posts to do. The first one has to do with today’s APOD. Can you spot the phoenix shape? It doesn’t mean anything special, it’s just the way our brains see the patterns of light from this gorgeous aurora in Iceland. Ionization of atmospheric gases from charged solar particles doesn’t sound as glamorous as ‘phoenix aurora,’ but I still appreciate the scientific beauty of it. Human beings are excellent at pattern recognition, and so we...
As someone who is a hobbyist astrophotographer, I’ve got a laundry list of astronomical events to photograph. Nebulas, Galaxies, star clusters, eclipses, and of course, aurorae! Where do the best aurorae happen? Near the north and south poles, so naturally it makes sense to visit those places where there is a bit of civilization, far north or south, with clear skies. The two places that are on my top list, outside of northern regions in my home country of Canada, are Iceland and Norway. Here are some reasons why: The aurora borealis are legendary in these parts of the world....
I’ve been saving this one for a few months, specifically for my Halloween post! This was such an interesting story, it was hard for me to pass it up before. There are ghosts in these distant galaxies! Look at the images above, and see the ghostly green figures. They are ionized Oxygen, helium, nitrogen, sulphur, and neon that has absorbed high energy radiation and slowly re-emitted it over thousands of years. The photoionized gas clouds in the images are tens of thousands of light years outside their host galaxies, so where did this high energy radiation come from? The answer, is...
Why should a galaxy have bluish spiral arms dotted with red patches and dark lanes. Why should it have a central region that is yellow and spherical rather than flat? Why are they flat to begin with? Because Galaxies are so huge, and made from hundreds of Billions of stars that change over the course of their lives, a galaxy shows the entire life cycle of a star in its own structure. Stars are born along spiral arms, where most of the thick dust and gas clouds are concentrated. The dark dust lanes of spiral arms condense to form stars,...
Auroras on Earth are caused by the ionization of atoms high in the atmosphere near the north and south magnetic poles. The solar wind flies toward the Earth and this harmful radiation is blocked and funnelled by our magnetic field, creating harmless, beautiful glows that remind us how close we came to total destruction, but were saved by our planet. Do other planets have auroras? Certainly! Jupiter and Saturn do, and even moons like Ganymede can have auroral activity. It really depends on the magnetic field. So how does a planet like Mars, with no magnetic field, have auroras? This...
After reaching a deeper understanding of the subsurface ocean of Enceladus just yesterday, a stunning discovery has just been made about the largest Moon in the solar system. The largest moon of Jupiter, Ganymede, contains a subsurface ocean of it’s own. The discovery was made with the Hubble space telescope and a careful study of aurora on the giant moon. That’s right Ganymede has auroral activity. This is because it is the only moon in the solar system with a magnetic field. The magnetic field funnels radiation from the Sun toward the north and south poles, where it ionizes molecules...
