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Clearest Photos Ever Of Horsehead Nebula
angkor writes "A new composite image created from high-res photographs. Wow, just wow. You can see it at SpaceFlightNow."
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http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/PR/2001/12/
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
You can almost make out the words:
Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.
Can be found here, http://www.eso.org You can find the link there to the images, or you can use this direct link: http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2002/phot -02-02.html
Have fun!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
It can be seen with almost any telescope. It's near the second star in Orion's Sword. Preaty neat. I wonder how long the exposure was on those pictures.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
I wonder what that nebula sounds like.
I am not a lawyer. Do not take my words as legal advice. If you need legal advice, consult an attorney.
It looks more like a knight than a horse head..
I've never seen a horse bend its neck like that..
(see subject)
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
there's an important piece of information missing.
In looking at this I'd appreciate some knowledge of the physical scale of the phenomenon, not in arc-seconds of sky image but in kilometers of extent of the feature.
It must be enormous, but how enormous? Anyone?
mt
I doubt that you can see in your 60mm more than a vague hint of the nebula. It's usually a bitch to photograph with high contrast.
:-)
About the exposure time, I'm sure that it wasn't too long. The VLT is composed of 4 telescopes, each with a 8.2 meters mirror. Most likely, only one of them was used, but even in this case, a few minutes would be enough to saturate the CCD
Hmm, I wonder whether this has something to do with the God Father ... food for thought.
- Penguin Kicka
Does anyone know where I can download some hi-res pictures of this?
~www.devnull.co.uk
I tried to see it with a 10" f/5.5 reflector at a good dark site near Tucson, and only got vague hints that there was anything there. But I suspect that my visual dark sensitivity isn't as good as many. Your milage may vary.
The astronomers were able to locate similar structures in the universe, some much closer to us than previously expected. Thus, the infamous "Horseshit Nebula" has been spotted in the Western Hemisphere and its origins were successfully traced to the Microsoft PR department.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Am I the only one trying to find Magrathea from those photos?
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It's common knowledge by now that the ancient Egyptians tried to recreate Heaven on Earth - look at the positioning and size of the pyramids on the Giza plateau as compared to the constellation of Orion's Belt. Even the Milky Way is represented by the Nile in the bigger picture.
I keep expecting to see Kheops' face in the nebula or something...
is here: http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2002/phot -02-02.html
I thought that was the Great Nebula in Orion's belt? I never knew it was also known as the Horse Head nebula. Cool.
I still break out the old 4 1/4 to show the kids. Now, I just want a regional power failure on a clear night so they can see it the way it was meant to be seen.
RD
What a waste it is to lose one's joke.
Move on. There's nothing to see here.
Here's am image what of the astronomers used to see.
"My fingers Emit sparks of fire in Expectation of my future labours." William Blake
3 exposures in the visual spectrum. That means they didn't need to remap any colors for it to be seen. Now if it said "false color image", then you'd be right. But it didn't. Not all space images get their colors messed with.
That extension off to the left, that's a tail.
It was habit in this show to put the sponsor's brand in the secret message. The particular message decoded when the film's protagonist decoded his first secret message with the decoder ring was, you guessed it: "Be sure to drink your ovaltine."
Sorry, but I think I ressurected this phrase a few days ago with this link and this link.
The Horse Head Nebula is a smaller part of the Great Nebula-complex, which apparent size is considerably larger. The region sports a large ammount of "star cradels" and is littered with all kinds of nebulae of alla shapes and sizes. The Horse head and the Great Nebula are the most famous and prominent.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
It's also very difficult to see, as suggested by the fact that it doesn't have a Messier number.
-Legion
While the pics at the article site look nice, I'm sure that the clearest ever pictures taken of the Horsehead Nebula are not 72 dpi.
Anyone got a link to a higher quality version?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I don't have a clue what the reference has to do with the article, but the quote is from the movie A Christmas Story. Ralphie gets his secret decoder ring and decodeds a message (IIRC) from Little Orphan Annie that says "Be sure to drink your ovaltine".
...Until I can snap my consumer-grade giga-pixel pocket
camera onto my backyard computer-tracking 12" Dobsonian and take pictures like this myself. Of course for concrete canyon dwellers we have the 60mm refractor w/camera for more "earthly" observations...
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
I am wondering what it would look like if you could fly a spaceship there. Would it look like the place where Kirk and Kahn played "hide and seek" in Wrath of Kahn? Or, are the gasses so thinly spread out that you would not see anything but the usual inky black of space, and would be wondering "where the f**k is it???"
God apparently prefers the older logo.
--- Work, worry, consume, die. It's a wonderful life. -- Bill Griffith
This has always bugged me.
You can't refer to digital images via DPI. It just doens't translate. It's meaningless.
You can't measure data with a ruler.
So.. why do you say it's 72dpi?
...look like a horsie!
High-res originals are here, and more info can be found here:
h ot -02-02.html
http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2002/p
The Hubble Space Telescope imaged it last year. They ran an internet poll to pick a target for the Hubble to observe, and the Horsehead won (Cowboy Neal was second, maybe). The Hubble Heritage Project published the result (it's a composite with some ground-based images filling in the edges) and it is better than the VLT picture, IMHO. You can see it here , along with lots of information about how it was made, and high-res versions.
--Seen
"I used to be a dilettante. Then I thought I'd try something else for a while."
If we went to the horsehead nebula would we find the Magratheans in suspended animation until the galactic stock prices omproved?
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
What a screw! The link goes to a web site with a low res picture and they want you to subscribe to some crappy printed magazine from Tonbridge, I mean disgusted or what?
Has anyone got a decent 1600x1200 of this we can download without bothering these wankers?
The original Doctor Dark.
While the images are truly beautiful, I also wanted to note that ESO's VLT system is driven by Tcl/Tk (95% of the UI for the instruments are Tk-based, with Tcl being the scripting glue language for the instruments, connecting C++ libraries). While the machines are mostly HP-UX, they are transitioning to Linux (they are almost wholy a non-MS shop).
I know astronomers try to look at nebulas like so many clouds floating in the earth's atmosphere when they come up with names. However, this does not look like a horse head -- come on guys, log off of alt.fan.buffy, get out of the observatory and visit a farm. Or at least go rent the Godfather. That isn't even close to what a horse head looks like.
The "Horsehead Nebula" looks more like the end of finger with a 'booger' hanging off it. You can clearly see the fingernail in the light spot, the roundness of the tip and a really big, narly hunk of hardened snot hanging off the tip, defying gravity from its stickiness. You even have the natural arch that the finger would be from the person proudly examining the nose nugget just recently mined.
The "Horsehead Nebula" is nothing more than the galactic scribbles of some interstellar 4th grade brat trying to gross out less enlightened civilizations. I suggest that the name should changed based on this revelation to the "The Booger Finger Nebula". Science is about truth, sugar coating the name of a Nebula to be "socially pleasant" doesn't match that belief. Plus, if you were teaching science to kids, which name would catch their attention first?
A Side Note: Do you think that naming places where other "beings" might live be a little dangerous? What happens if they really, really don't like the name?
To quote _The Astronomy Cafe_, by Sten Odenwald, page 111, question 186:
186 Would a nebula look colorful if you traveled into it?
Interstellar space is filled with a thin gas, and in some places this gas forms clouds. When stars form in these gas clouds, they light up the cloud, forming spectacular nebulosities of colored light as the gases in the cloud are stimulated by the light from the individual stars. Although nebulas like the ones in Plates 2 and 7 [in the book] are lovely and colorful, you would see nothing at all if you were inside one because the gases are so spread out in space and there is no blank sky against which to see the contrast. At a density of only a few hundred atoms per cubic centimeter, most nebulas are better than the best vacuums we can make on Earth, and as such, it would be impossible to see anything of their color if you were inside one of them. I am always amused by movies that portray a starship inside or very near a very colorful nebula or with background skies swirling with color. In reality, nature is far less colorful, and even the Great Nebula in Orion, with all of its color, would be almost invisible from inside.
--
"Everybody wants a rock to wind a piece of string around." - They Might Be Giants, "We Want a Rock"
...really puts us in our place. I love seeing deep space pictures, even if they are faint through my personal telescope. I think my favorite picture of "putting us in our place" would be the one that is about 2x3 inches, and is just filled with galaxies. At first glace it looks like a lot of stars, but you begin to notice that they are galaxies, hundreds of them in one small photo. Amazing! Anyone have a link to this or have any idea what I'm talking about? :)
proton != antielectron
check the angular res for hubble. it's nowhere near it's original design spec, and i think you'll find these pics are as good as or better than hubble for just that reason.
Actually, I think ESO's is a clear winner.
Compare ESO's version (largest is 4.6MB JPEG @ 1951x2366)
and
any on Hubble's page (wide @ 800x813, closeup @ 1000x800).
NOAO has better images than Hubble's too, but they're also wide angle (but still really nice)...
Hubble's MPEG movie animation is very cool though.
When are we going to get some high-res images of
the Pee-Wee Herman face on Mars?
What an outstanding link you provided. I only wish that the excellent new photo discussed in the article was so easily available in downloadable format. While the information with the original article was quite good, in general, of providing a discussion of the who, what, where and when of the Horsehead, the information at your link to heritage.stsci.edu site was even better. Many thanks for your excellent and informative link. I missed that on the Heritage site when originally posted somehow. Such contributions are what make Slashdot worth reading. After clicking my way through the assorted trolls and too often inane remarks it is a pleasure to see a post like yours!
call me stupid but if you look closely at the middle left side of the first picture you could see a clowd shaped like a woman.
In a few hundred years it may look nothing like a horse. Space clouds move. A few hundred years ago somebody named the "Keyhole Nebula". Now the keyhole shape is gone.
All the names we give to these things will be obsolete. We will have to go back to calling them NGC3098239874 or whatever.
I will mostly miss the flipping finger shape from one of those Hubble images. I forgot which nebula it was, but I would love a poster of the finger section. Anybody remember where the "Finger Nebula" was? Much more intruging than the Mars Face.
Table-ized A.I.
A 60mm telescope isn't anywhere near big enough to allow visual observation of this object, even with an H-alpha filter. Try perhaps a 12" with filter for a vague hint, or a 24" without filter for blindingly obvious. Anywhere in between without a filter is going to be challenging (thus making it a "favorite" as the article states).
Not sure if this is what you are talking about, but this looks like a "flipping finger." :)
proton != antielectron
Why does it look as if it's a cloud with a single light source shining from the upper right, creating shadows and highlights?
Is there a light source there, or is it an artifact of their image processing or something else?
You probably mean the Hubble Deep Field project.
u ll.jpg
There's links to a bunch of their pictures at
http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/96/01.html
The big picture (2 MB) is at http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/96/01/MosaicF
... may help!
:o(
The Horsehead is not part of M42 or "The Great Nebula" in Orion's Sword. It actually hangs off the easternmost star in Orion's Belt, Alnitak or zeta Orionis. I think you'd have a job seeing it with your 60mm refractor
Yep. The Great Orion nebula, aka M42, is a naked-eye object under any reasonably un-light-polluted sky. I see it well in 7x50 binoculars, and it's amazing in my 115 mm telescope. I see 4 stars in the Trapezium easily, and under good conditions the nebula is faintly green. It photographs as pink, but that's another story about the different spectral response of the humn eye and colour film.
The Horsehead nebula, on the other hand, is tough. I have photographs that show M42 clearly, with a limiting magnitude about 7.5, but not a hint of I434 and friends, which is 3 degrees north of M42.
...laura, looking forward to seeing NGC3372 aka the Eta Carinae nebula in a few weeks
So the hell what. Notice they say image and not photograph. This is just someone else's artistic rendition of what they think it "looks" like. But since 99% of the information is not in the visible spectrum, whats the point? This data is nor more complete than it was the last time we has such an image. Just that someone though they could make the image more appealing by upping the resolution, but since its all just a simulated image, what is the real point...
Am I the only person to see a hooded face in this picture? It's about half way down, and 1/4 of the way from the right edge.
Looks like the smoke of a burning CueCat against a pretty background.
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Siggy, siggy, siggy, can't you see? Sometimes your puns just irritate me.
It looks like on the horses neck, there is a nekee woman with gigiantic nipples.
Maybe I should watch less porn.
(* Not sure if this is what you are talking about, but this [nasa.gov] looks like a "flipping finger." *)
Yeah, thats it! Cool isn't it. God or aliens flipping off the human race?
Do you suppose they would spend taxpayer money to zoom in on it in later missions? Otherwise the blow-up would look grainy/fuzzy. I want a *nice* poster.
It even has a "baby finger" next to it. How cute.
Perhaps they can name the baby the Commute Nebula
Thanks!
Table-ized A.I.
what does "yhbt yhl hand" mean?
The first thing that I noticed when I looked at the link is that there's an fairly easily visible image of some kind of hooded figure that looks eerily like "death" (in the classical image) along the right hand side of the picture.
:)
If you look at the "head of the horse's", travel down the right side of the "neck", there's a gap where you can see through the image. Am I the only one who sees an image like the masked villian in Scream (the movie)? It was the first thing that I noticed and I was suprised that no one else mentioned it since it seems very clear to me.
I just throught that I'd mention it since I didn't see anyone else saying this and I start to question whether I'm just seeing inkblot images where other people are seeing butterflies.
Otherwise the pictures are truly amazing. What an amazing universe we live in, and how little can we see from our little section of it.
The artice is a little fuzzy about the details so it's rather difficult to say if it is, in fact better than the Hubble shot, it does look better to my eye, but sometimes your eyes can decieve you.
On the other hand, if you're only talking about which image makes a better desktop background....
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
>Posted: January 26, 2002
>...
>The original CCD frames were obtained in February 2000
It Took 2 years to publish the photos?????
There is more to resolution than the size of an image. There are features clearly visible in the Hubble image that are not visible in the VLT image. It simply looks sharper, not to mention that the larger ESO image covers a wider field. The VLT image does seem to have better contrast in some of the darker regions than the Hubble image, but sharper and higher resolution? At best it seem on par with the HST image, not higher resolution. The NOAO images are MUCH lower resolution than both, they look pretty, but certainly not even close to the quality of either the HST or VLT.
maybe they should rename the article, "Scientist take yet another grainy-ass picture of something in outter space, rest of world uninterested."
I think the comparison is almost a wash, given the circumstances:
:-)
1. The Hubble image was done in one shot, but did not have to compensate for atmospheric interference.
2. The VLT image was done by compositing several images, digitally-processed to remove atmospheric interference.
I can't wait for the Hubble replacement now in early development.
Yeah, that's it. I love that picture, it makes my head hurt! Thanks!
proton != antielectron
To be exact, at 72 dpi, a block of 72 x 72 pixels will translate to 5184 dots on 1 square inch on paper. Hence, Dots Per Inch. What you described is 72ppi.
Yeah, I know those are commonly incorrectly mixed.
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