NGC 3921, Spirit Galaxy

Celestial Buddy Earth peers out at Mother Earth from the ISS after hitching a ride on this weeks SpaceX Dragon test flight

Melotte 15, Inside the Heart

A fleeting moment in time

The faint, ephemeral glow emanating from the planetary nebula ESO 577-24 persists for only a short time – around 10,000 years, a blink of an eye in astronomical terms. ESO’s Very Large Telescope captured this shell of glowing ionized gas – the last breath of the dying star whose simmering remains are visible at the heart of this image. As the gaseous shell of this planetary nebula expands and grows dimmer, it will slowly disappear from sight.

This stunning planetary nebula was imaged by one of the VLT’s most versatile instruments, FORS2. The instrument captured the bright, central star, Abell 36, as well as the surrounding planetary nebula. The red and blue portions of this image correspond to optical emission at red and blue wavelengths, respectively.

An object much closer to home is also visible in this image – an asteroid wandering across the field of view has left a faint track below and to the left of the central star. And in the far distance behind the nebula a glittering host of background galaxies can be seen. Credit: ESO    

Read more ~ phys.org

55 Nights with Saturn

NGC 1309: Spiral Galaxy and Friends 

Image Credit: Hubble Legacy Archive, ESA, NASA; Processing - Jeff Signorelli

'Space Butterfly' Is Home to Hundreds of Baby Stars

What looks like a red butterfly in space is in reality a nursery for hundreds of baby stars, revealed in this infrared image from our Spitzer Space Telescope. Officially named Westerhout 40 (W40), the butterfly is a nebula — a giant cloud of gas and dust in space where new stars may form. The butterfly’s two “wings” are giant bubbles of hot, interstellar gas blowing from the hottest, most massive stars in this region.

Besides being beautiful, W40 exemplifies how the formation of stars results in the destruction of the very clouds that helped create them. Inside giant clouds of gas and dust in space, the force of gravity pulls material together into dense clumps. Sometimes these clumps reach a critical density that allows stars to form at their cores. Radiation and winds coming from the most massive stars in those clouds — combined with the material spewed into space when those stars eventually explode — sometimes form bubbles like those in W40. But these processes also disperse the gas and dust, breaking up dense clumps and reducing or halting new star formation.

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Ripples in the rings of Saturn caused by the orbit of small moons (Pandora, Pan, Prometheus, Atlas, Daphnis, etc.)

To see the animation click here

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cassini & Planetary Ring Image of the Day 

photography / hipster / indie / grunge

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“There are people who are always in love with the sky, no matter the weather. One day you will find someone who’ll love you the same way.”

Omg I’m dying

my favorite thing about the spanish harry potter translation is that instead of calling voldemort “the dark lord,” they call him señor tenebroso, which basically means “mr. spooky”