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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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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!
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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
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.
Am I the only one trying to find Magrathea from those photos?
_________________________
Spelling and grammar mistakes left as an exercise for the reader.
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
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
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.
It's also very difficult to see, as suggested by the fact that it doesn't have a Messier number.
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".
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!
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."
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).
Fine, fine. s/Microsoft PR department/Your-favorite-Company's PR department/g.
Geez, it's like you've never worked with PR people. The joke is aimed at them, not Microsoft.
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
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"
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.
Larger pics are available here. The largest is a 1951x2366-pixel JPEG. You'll have to crop some text off of the pic yourself to use it as a desktop, it appears.
Remember, Google is your friend.
Liberty in your lifetime
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.
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?
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
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....
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Moderators: read the article and look at the pictures before you start throwing ill-informed "Offtopic" mods around (yes, *this* comment will be modded into a bottomless pit, but the parent was actually on-topic).
-Legion
Most star light (and nebula glow through either reflected star light, or absorbed and re-emitted star light) is at two wavelengths, approx 650nm and 500nm. From memory, these correspond to the hydrogen alpha and oxygen III lines.
The dark adapted human eye loses a lot of its colour sensitivity, so images seen at night tend to be 'black and white', but even so, it is much more sensitive at 500 than 650nm. This is why nebula such as M42/43 (The 'Great' Orion nebula) and the nearby Horsehead nebula look to be a pale blue-green to the eye. The types of colour film used in astrophotography, and CCD cameras, are highly sensitive to 650nm, but 500nm falls into the less sensitive area between two of the colour emulsion layers of film. This means that photographs come out pink.
This sig is a figment of your imagination.
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.
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.
Yes, this is an interesting phenomenon.
Often, when viewing pictures of nebula people will see faces. The first time I say a picture I say a bunch of faces that immediatly reminded me of the dwarves from The Hobbit.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on