I love false-colour images. They reveal detail that you can’t see in real life, but they also highlight things in an artistic way. For me it’s an excellent marriage of art and science, and as a communicator it helps me get concepts across in an accessible way. So when I saw the APOD image of Saturn from earlier this week, I had to discuss it. Saturn never has looked this way, and it never will. The colours are vivid and unrealistic, but they show the differences in three distinct but close wavelengths of light on the electromagnetic spectrum. All of...
Remember the big picture of Andromeda that showed 100 Million stars? That image resulted in a ton of new galaxy discoveries. Most of these new galaxies were once hidden beyond the Andromeda galaxy, but with the super high resolution image, astronomers and the public were able to look straight through and see far more distant objects. Most images of galaxies have what we call ‘field stars’ in them. These are some of the 400 Billion stars of the Milky Way that are far closer than the galaxy we are imaging. For this reason, galaxy images tend to look very cluttered...
The big dipper is visible every day of the year from the Northern Hemisphere. It’s easily recognizable and most people have spotted it at least once in their life. But most people also assume that it is just a boring collection of stars where nothing interesting ever happens. The big dipper is so much more than a simple spoon in the sky, especially right now. The well-known asterism, part of the much larger Ursa Major constellation, is home to many visible deep-sky objects, though right now it is visited by the comet C/2013 US10 Catalina, close to the visible binary...
