daily telescope

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s May 16, and today’s image comes from an on-demand satellite imagery company named HEO. Only this image is not of the Earth, but rather the International Space Station.

According to the company, which is headquartered in Australia, one of its cameras imaged the space station at a distance of 69.06 km away, over the Indian Ocean. HEO flies its sensors as hosted payloads on satellites in Earth orbit. However, HEO’s focus is not on Earth; it’s on other spacecraft in low-Earth orbit to assess their status and identify anomalous behavior.

As for the space station, it remains in good health after a quarter of a century of operations. NASA is currently working with its international partners to extend the station’s operations through 2030. After that, the space agency would like to retire the vehicle and transition to commercially operated space stations.

Source: HEO on X.

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s March 12, and today’s photo comes from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Astronomers have long been fascinated by a nebula, NGC 604, in the relatively nearby Triangulum Galaxy. That’s because this nebula contains about 200 of the hottest and largest types of stars, most of which are in the early stages of their lives. Some of these stars are 100 times or more massive than the Sun. Astronomers know of no other region in the Universe so densely packed with large stars as this nebula.

In this image, captured by the Near-Infrared Camera on the Webb telescope, there are brilliant reds and oranges. Here’s the explanation from astronomers for these colors:

The most noticeable features are tendrils and clumps of emission that appear bright red, extending out from areas that look like clearings, or large bubbles in the nebula. Stellar winds from the brightest and hottest young stars have carved out these cavities, while ultraviolet radiation ionizes the surrounding gas. This ionized hydrogen appears as a white and blue ghostly glow. The bright orange streaks in the Webb near-infrared image signify the presence of carbon-based molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

The nebula is only about 3.5 million years old.

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s March 7, and today’s photo features a Halley-type comet that is currently approaching the Sun. It will reach perihelion on April 21.

The comet, named 12P/Pons–Brooks, features a brilliant ion tail, and its nucleus is estimated to be around 30 km in diameter. The comet should brighten further as it nears the Sun in the coming weeks. However, at an apparent magnitude of 4.5, it is unlikely to be visible to the naked eye—that’s why we have telescopes.

12P/Pons–Brooks was imaged here by the Virtual Telescope Project facility in Manciano, Italy. The covered field of view is about 16×11 square degrees, and there is a bonus photobombing by the Andromeda Galaxy.

Source: Gianluca Masi

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s March 5, and today’s image comes from the James Webb Space Telescope.

It’s a new deep-field image from the infrared space telescope, showcasing a portion of the “Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey” region of space that has previously been observed by other space telescopes, including Hubble and Chandra. Almost everything in this image that doesn’t have lines emanating from it is a galaxy.

Such deep field images are poetic in that they’re just showing a tiny fraction of a sky—the width of this image is significantly less than a single degree of the night sky—and yet they reveal a universe teeming with galaxies. We live in a cosmos that is almost incomprehensibly large.

If you click through to the Webb telescope site you will find an annotated image that highlights a galaxy in the far lower-right corner. It is galaxy GN-z11, seen at a time just 430 million years after the Big Bang.

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, et. al.

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s March 1, and today’s image showcases two nebulae within the Orion constellation.

On the left of the image you can see the Flame Nebula, named as such because it’s an emoticon often used in gaming chats—just kidding. Rather, it’s an emission nebula about 1,000 light-years from Earth. To the right of the image is the rather iconic Horsehead Nebula, which really does resemble the head of a horse. It’s a little less than 1,400 light-years from Earth. The darkness in the nebula is mostly due to thick dust blocking the light of the stars behind it.

Andrew Desrosiers sent in this image, which he took from his home in Ashby, Massachusetts. It’s the product of about 60 hours of observing the same location of the night sky.

“This is part of a project I started early this winter to keep my telescope just trained on this part of the sky all winter,” he told me. “So far I have captured 60 hours of exposure data.” He hopes to get to 100 before the end of the season.

Source: Andrew Desrosiers

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s February 26, and today’s image highlights the core of a (relatively) nearby supernova.

In the astronomy community, SN 1987A has somewhat legendary status. The first observable light from this exploding star in the Large Magellanic Cloud reached Earth in February, almost 37 years ago to the day. It was the first supernova that astronomers were able to observe and study with modern telescopes. It was still discussed in reverent terms a few years later when I was an undergraduate student studying astronomy at the University of Texas.

One of the enduring mysteries of the supernova is that astronomers have been unable to find its collapsed core, where they would expect to see a neutron star—an ultra-dense object that results from the supernova explosion of a massive star. In recent years, ground-based telescopes have found hints of this collapsed core, but now the James Webb Space Telescope has found emission lines that almost certainly must come from a newly born neutron star.

The astronomical details can be found here. It’s a nice validation of our understanding about supernovae.

I would also like to acknowledge that the Daily Telescope has been anything but “daily” of late. This is due to a confluence of several factors, including a lot of travel and work on other projects, including four features in the last month or so. I’ve had to put some things on the back-burner. I don’t want to stop producing these articles, but I also can’t commit to writing one every day. Maybe it should be renamed? For now, I’m just going to try to do my best. I appreciate those who have written to ask where the Daily Telescope has been—well, all of you but the person who wrote a nasty note.

Source: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, et. al.

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s February 2, and today’s image concerns an emission nebula about 5,000 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation.

Discovered more than 230 years ago by William Herschel, astronomers believe the Crescent Nebula is formed by the combination of an energetic stellar wind from a Wolf-Rayet star at its core, colliding with slower-moving material ejected earlier in the star’s lifetime. Ultimately, this should all go supernova, which will be quite spectacular.

Will you or I be alive to see it? Probably not.

But in the meantime, we can enjoy the nebula for what it is. This photo was captured by Ars reader 1Zach1 with an Astro-Tech AT80ED Refractor telescope. It was the product of 11 hours of integration, or 228 exposures each lasting three minutes. It was taken in rural southwestern Washington.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

Source: 1Zach1

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s January 15, and today’s image comes to us from Playa Grande, Mexico.

I realize that some readers may be tiring of seeing the Milky Way Galaxy, but not me! I love photos of our galaxy and so they are regularly featured in the Daily Telescope. However, this photo is truly special, as it highlights not just the heavens above, but one of the wonders here on Earth.

Alfonso Tamés sent me this image, and I can’t get enough of it. The photo showcases both our galaxy and a bit of the Orion Nebula in the sky and bioluminescence in the ocean—that is light being emitted by marine life in the sea. One of the most amazing nights I’ve ever had is kayaking in a bioluminescent bay in Puerto Rico, such an eerie and otherworldly experience.

It is fun to contemplate all of the life on display in this image, both what is known in the ocean and what may exist around all those stars above. Have a great week, everyone.

Source: Alfonso Tamés

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s January 11, and today’s image showcases a diffuse nebula known as NGC 7538, found in the constellation Cepheus.

Located some 9,000 light-years from Earth, the nebula is a region of active star formation and produces a large amount of hydrogen—which shows up in this image. The nebula contains a shockingly large protostar that is, astronomers estimate, some 300 times larger than our Solar System and has a mass of 2,000 Suns. Even as astronomical objects go, that’s gargantuan.

Paul Buckley submitted today’s photo, which he captured from his backyard in Elma, New York, located not far from Buffalo. He took the image over the first three days of last September. This image represents 100 six-minute narrowband images and 50 two-minute RGB images using his Celestron 9.25-inch Edge HD telescope.

I think it’s lovely.

Source: Paul Buckley

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s January 4, and today’s image is a photo of our star, Sol. The image was captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, a spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit, on Wednesday.

So why a picture of the Sun? Because we’ve just passed perihelion, the point at which planet Earth reaches its closest point to the Sun. This year perihelion came at 00: 38 UTC on Wednesday, January 3. We got to within about 91.4 million miles (147 million km) of the star. Due to its slightly elliptical orbit around the Sun, Earth will reach aphelion this year on July 5, at a distance of 94.5 million miles (152 million km).

There is a bit of irony for those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere, of course. We approach nearest to the Sun at almost the coldest time of year, just a couple of weeks after the winter solstice. Our planet’s seasons are determined by Earth’s axial tilt, however, not its proximity to the Sun.

In any case, happy new year, a time when the world can seem full of possibility—shiny and bright like a star.

Source: NASA SDO

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’re going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It’s December 21, and today’s image showcases our very own Milky Way Galaxy above the Pyrenees mountain range, which separates Spain from the rest of Europe.

It was sent in by a reader who captured it while hiking through the mountains and in their words bivvying—a new word for “minimalist camping” that I learned about five minutes ago. I’m jealous. Hiking through the Pyrenees and gazing at the stars at night sounds like a wonderful dream. The photographer told me they are no great astrophotographer, but that the skies were so dark and brilliant that even this single exposure photo taken with a Fuji X100 APS camera looks stunning.

“It’s still one of my favorite starry skies memories from hiking the Haute Randonnée Pyrénéenne, a high mountain route going all the way coast to coast along the French‑Spanish border,” the photographer said. “Because both the daytime and nighttime vistas there were just bloody marvelous.”

I have greatly enjoyed writing these Daily Telescope entries and seeing the amazing work you all have sent in. We’ve published everything from the very best images taken by NASA’s space telescopes down to iPhone photos. We all share the skies, and see and document them in our own way. Thank you so much for your submissions; there have been many more than we can publish. But I treasure them all and your time in sending them in. I can’t wait to see what delights the new year will bring. Until then, happy holidays, and may your stars be merry and bright.

Source: bulbs_01_frizzle

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.