Posts Tagged ‘big bang prints’

Big Bang Monday: Shot Through The Heart

Monday, December 10th, 2012

Just in time for the 12-12-12 Concert to benefit Sandy victims, Phil Plait’s piece in Slate suggests the Bon Jovi song…

Oh!
Shot through the heart
And you’re to blame
You give love a bad name
I play my part and you play your game
You give love a bad name (bad name)

Just watch the video from the Hubble folks…


Big Bang Monday: Tour of Star-Forming Region Sharpless 2-106

Monday, October 22nd, 2012

Nicely done by the folks over at HubbleSite.

THAT would look cool running on a big flat screen. Some would argue that’s a waste of electricity, so you might as well get yourself a big print instead.

Big Bang Monday: Hubble’s Top 100 Images

Monday, October 1st, 2012

Fantastic collection of the Hubble Space Telescope’s “Top 100 Images” on the ESA site. All beautiful, with some more interesting that others. For example, the “engraved hourglass nebula” or MyCn18

This is an image of MyCn18, a young planetary nebula located about 8,000 light-years away, taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

This Hubble image reveals the true shape of MyCn18 to be an hourglass with an intricate pattern of ‘etchings’ in its walls. This picture has been composed from three separate images taken in the light of ionized nitrogen (represented by red), hydrogen (green), and doubly-ionized oxygen (blue).

The results are of great interest because they shed new light on the poorly understood ejection of stellar matter which accompanies the slow death of Sun-like stars. In previous ground-based images, MyCn18 appears to be a pair of large outer rings with a smaller central one, but the fine details cannot be seen.

Credit: Raghvendra Sahai and John Trauger (JPL), the WFPC2 science team, and NASA/ESA

Big Bang Monday: Arp 116

Monday, September 10th, 2012

Nice video rendering. We know it’s really not that pretty.

Yeah, and no music in space…

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This video shows Hubble observations of Arp 116, a pair of galaxies in the constellation of Virgo. It is made up of M60, a large elliptical galaxy, and a smaller, bluer spiral galaxy, NGC 4647. It has long been unclear whether the two galaxies are actually interacting, or whether they simply appear close together from our distant vantage point. However, detailed studies of Hubble pictures suggest that the pair are beginning to experience tidal forces.

Credit: NASA, ESA. Music: R. Vreeland

Via ESA. Makes a pretty picture (more…)

Big Bang Monday: L.B.T.O.

Monday, March 19th, 2012

The images captured by the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory in Arizona may not seem like much to us common folk, but to serious astronomers this is hot stuff. And with language such as “previously impossible discoveries” used in their press release, this is no casual piece of news.

And this is the best ever taken of four young stars in the Orion Trapezium cluster?

A view of four young stars in the Orion Trapezium cluster 1,350 light-years away, as seen through the LBT’s Adaptive Optics (AO). This is the best image ever taken of these stars, which are all tightly located within 1 arcsecond of each other. By comparing this 2.16 micron infrared image to past images of this group over the last 15 years, astronomers can now see the motion of each star with respect to the others. The movements show that the mini-cluster of young stars were born together, but will likely fall apart as the stars age and interact with each other.

These may not be the kind of gorgeous images (suitable for framing) we’re usually getting excited about. For the astronomers associated with this observatory — and all those who’ll benefit from this technology in the future — these images are amazing and show break-through scientific advances at their best.

No relation to the Canadian rock band BTO (Bachman Turner Overdrive), although their music could make the LBTO videos more exciting to watch.


Big Bang Monday: Carina Nebula

Monday, February 13th, 2012

Awesome image from the European South Observatory (image credit: ESO/T. Preibisch)…

This broad panorama of the Carina Nebula, a region of massive star formation in the southern skies, was taken in infrared light using the HAWK-I camera on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Many previously hidden features, scattered across a spectacular celestial landscape of gas, dust and young stars, have emerged.

Sit back a watch this “trailer” about the VLT (Very Large Telescope)…

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Get yourself a huge piece to hang on your wall at Big Bang Prints. Good stuff!


Big Bang Monday: Supernova Remnants

Monday, February 6th, 2012

After a very nice Super Bowl yesterday, those of us who spent the time watching eating and drinking massive quantities of stuff we shouldn’t, may be dealing with remnants on another kind of bowl.

How appropriate that today’s Image of the Day from NASA is “Remnant of A Supernova” (G350.1+0.3)…

Vital clues about the devastating ends to the lives of massive stars can be found by studying the aftermath of their explosions. In its more than twelve years of science operations, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has studied many of these supernova remnants sprinkled across the galaxy.

The latest example of this important investigation is Chandra’s new image of the supernova remnant known as G350.1+0.3. This stellar debris field is located some 14,700 light years from the Earth toward the center of the Milky Way.

Evidence from Chandra and from ESA’s XMM-Newton telescope suggest that a compact object within G350.1+0.3 may be the dense core of the star that exploded. The position of this likely neutron star, seen by the arrow pointing to “neutron star” in the inset image, is well away from the center of the X-ray emission. If the supernova explosion occurred near the center of the X-ray emission then the neutron star must have received a powerful kick in the supernova explosion.

Data suggest this supernova remnant, as it appears in the image, is 600 and 1,200 years old. If the estimated location of the explosion is correct, this means the neutron star has been moving at a speed of at least 3 million miles per hour since the explosion.

Another intriguing aspect of G350.1+0.3 is its unusual shape. Many supernova remnants are nearly circular, but G350.1+0.3 is strikingly asymmetrical as seen in the Chandra data in this image (gold). Infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope (light blue) also trace the morphology found by Chandra. Astronomers think that this bizarre shape is due to stellar debris field expanding into a nearby cloud of cold molecular gas.

The age of 600-1,200 years puts the explosion that created G350.1+0.3 in the same time frame as other famous supernovas that formed the Crab and SN 1006 supernova remnants. However, it is unlikely that anyone on Earth would have seen the explosion because of the obscuring gas and dust that lies along our line of sight to the remnant.

These results appeared in the April 10, 2011 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

Image Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/I. Lovchinsky et al; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The description references the “Crab Nebula” — get your prints here.


Big Bang Monday: H.U.D.F.

Monday, October 17th, 2011

Hubble Ultra Deep Field
WTF is HUDF? Hubble Ultra Deep Field, KWIM?

It’s the deepest ever. Seriously:

The Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) is an image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, composited from Hubble Space Telescope data accumulated over a period from September 24, 2003, through to January 16, 2004. It is the deepest image of the universe ever taken,[1] looking back approximately 13 billion years (between 400 and 800 million years after the Big Bang), and it will be used to search for galaxies that existed at that time. The HUDF image was taken in a section of the sky with a low density of bright stars in the near-field, allowing much better viewing of dimmer, more distant objects. The image contains an estimated 10,000 galaxies. In August and September 2009, the Hubble’s Deep Field was expanded using the infrared channel of the recently attached Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). When combined with existing HUDF data, astronomers were able to identify a new list of potentially very distant galaxies.[2]

Located southwest of Orion in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax, the image covers 11.0 square arcminutes. This is just one-seventieth the solid angle subtended by the full moon as viewed from Earth, smaller than a 1 mm-by-1 mm square of paper held 1 meter away, and equal to roughly one thirteen-millionth of the total area of the sky. The image is oriented so that the upper left corner points toward north (−46.4°) on the celestial sphere.

This would look good on your wall.

Big Bang Monday: Back Garden Variety

Monday, October 10th, 2011

Good show, I say!

Today’s Daily Mail (U.K.) writes of Damian Peach, Astronomer Photographer of the Year (2010)…

From detailed solar flares to an amazing image of Jupiter and two of its moons, this tour of our solar system has been captured by an amateur British astronomer in his back garden.

Damian Peach, an electronic engineer from Selsey, West Sussex, has spent the last ten years documenting the changing face of our solar system.

Spending a relatively modest £10,000 on a high-speed telescope and electrical equipment, Mr Peach’s crystal clear images are good enough to rival those of Nasa and the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

So much so that in 2010, he became the only Briton to win the prestigious Astronomy Photographer Of The Year Award for his composite photograph of Jupiter’s moons, Ganymede and Io, orbiting the stormy surface of the gas giant.

Mr Peach said: ‘It’s just fantastic that it’s possible to do something like this from your own back garden.

‘This has been made possible by recent leaps in technology. These days surprisingly good results are possible with small telescopes and low cost webcams.

‘The results possible for home astronomers now were not achievable until the 1990s by even the largest telescopes on Earth.

‘The resolution possible with large amateur telescopes could now be considered of a professional quality in what the images reveal on the planets.’

Great job, mate!

You can skip this step and go directly to the million-dollar images the space agencies put out, and get a monster-size print for a few bucks.

Big Bang Monday: NGC 281

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

Today’s image comes to us courtesy of the Spitzer Space Telescope

This composite image of NGC 281 contains X-ray data from Chandra (purple) with infrared observations from Spitzer (red, green, blue). The high-mass stars in NGC 281 drive many aspects of their galactic environment through powerful winds flowing from their surfaces and intense radiation that heats surrounding gas, “boiling it away” into interstellar space. This process results in the formation of large columns of gas and dust, as seen on the left side of the image. These structures likely contain newly forming stars. The eventual deaths of massive stars as supernovas will also seed the galaxy with material and energy.

Read more about NGC 281.