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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
Am I the only one trying to find Magrathea from those photos?
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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...
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
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?
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."
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.
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
That's exactly what it is, although "upper right" is northwest. Sigma Orionis, far outside the field of view of the camera, is the illuminating star. Most of the stars seen in the image are foreground objects seen hanging in front of the clouds behind them.
Edith Keeler Must Die
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.