![]() ![]() NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) The center of M104 is thought to be home to a massive black hole. The hallmark of the nearly edge-on galaxy is a brilliant, white, bulbous core encircled by thick dust lanes comprising the spiral structure of the galaxy. “We’re going to search one more time, you know, just to make sure.” This stunning Hubble image mosaic is of M104, also known as the Sombrero galaxy. “We think we found all the ones, for the most part, that are worthy of creating an image out of,” Jelectic explains. That, or they comb through the Hubble archive looking for suitable scenes that haven’t been published yet and process them (as was the case with M14). They don’t purposefully take new images of Messier objects to add to the catalog rather they wait for a scientific proposal that overlaps with the targets. The scavenger hunt is not yet complete-the Hubble Messier Catalog currently exhibits images of 84 of the 110 Messier objects and plots them on an interactive map-but that’s partly because of the way in which the Hubble team has gone about building out the collection. “That way, amateur astronomers can look at an object in their telescope, and then compare it to what Hubble sees.” ”So we said, ‘Well, let’s go back to that Messier catalog,” he recalls. In 2017, his team was brainstorming ways to get the amateur astronomy community involved and feeling more connected with Hubble science. The Hubble Messier Catalog is much newer, according to James Jeletic, NASA’s deputy project manager for Hubble. The numbers indicate the order in which Messier discovered the objects, though he only found 103 of the current 110- additions were made by other astronomers in the mid-20th century. The series includes globular star clusters like M14, nebulae such as the Eagle Nebula (M16) and Crab Nebula (M1), and even the Andromeda galaxy (M31). ![]() His catalog grew out of his notes on sightings from the Northern Hemisphere that could be confused as streaking balls of ice and dust to keep other comet seekers from wasting their time. Messier was born in 1730 and developed a fascination with comets, ultimately discovering the “Great Comet” of 1769, which exhibited an extremely long tail as it passed near Earth. “People can’t see the ultraviolet, for instance, when they look with their ground telescopes.” Gendlerīut five years ago, the NASA Hubble team decided to begin posting the legendary space telescope’s observations of the vintage catalog online “to give people a chance to view the Messier objects in a way that they might not otherwise be able to do, especially since in many cases we can see colors of light that don’t get through the atmosphere,” says Hubble Operations Project Scientist Kenneth Carpenter. Johnson (University of Washington), the PHAT team and R. The 1.5 billion pixels in the mosaic reveal over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the pancake-shaped disk of M31, also known as the Andromeda galaxy. Assembled from a total of 7,398 exposures taken over 411 individual pointings of the telescope, this image of our nearest major galactic neighbor, M31, is the largest Hubble mosaic to date. The objects are bright and relatively easy to see with small ground telescopes, and so are popular with the amateur astronomy community. Of course, NASA has shared many stunning views of the universe since Hubble was launched in 1990, but this newly processed image has another claim to fame-it’s known as Messier 14, one of the dozens of celestial objects cataloged by French astronomer and comet hunter Charles Messier beginning in 1758. In the case of globular cluster M14, those drops of white, blue, and orange paint are more than 150,000 stars packed at the periphery of a spiral galaxy 29,000 light-years away from Earth. When NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope takes an image of a star field, it usually looks more like an abstract painting than a real piece of the universe. Johnson (STScI) Image Processing: Gladys Kober SHARE A small gap in Hubble data (horizontal line at center right) is instead filled in with observations from the ground-based Victor M. This image of M19 includes Hubble observations taken in ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths of light. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |