This is a photo of the Andromeda galaxy I took nearly 5 years ago. The dark parts of the galaxy are gigantic clouds of dust and gas in which no stars and planets are born. This galaxy is one the closest one to our own, and yet it's 2.55 million light years from us, It's composed of about 1000 billion stars, in a few billion years it will collide with our own galaxy.
The two lighter blotches around Andromeda are two satellite Galaxys that orbit around Andromeda and are also composed of millions of stars.
Those numbers are so big they start to get inconceivable, and that's only a small fraction of what exists out-there. We are not much in the grand scheme of the universe, but when you look at the night sky and the wonders of the universe you can feel at least for a little while that you're part of it.
This reminded me of the isonitrile freezer at my previous internship.
For those who don't know, isonitriles (aka isocyanides) are a class of compounds that contain this motif:
They are known to smell very bad and many synthesis pathways to those compounds were discovered because of their stench. (I personally think they smell like a mixture of rotten cabbage and burned rubber but more ''artificial'')
So in that lab, we had a freezer dedicated to them, and even with sealed bottles in à -20°C freezers in a separated and ventilated cabinet, you would still be able to detect their odour if you stood next to it (not strongly, but still detectable).
We had to move that freezer to a new lab, it stayed unplugged for 15 to 20 minutes, and in the 5 minutes we need to power it back in the new lab, the entire room had filled with that isonitrile stench (mind you that freezer had not been open during the entire operation). Thankfully we did that on a Friday afternoon and by Monday the smell had disappeared.
Just for reference this is from the MSDS of benzyl isonitrile :
found on a fridge in my lab, haha
There might not be sound in space, but there is quite a lot to listen to in the radio frequencies (especially when it comes to the planets of the solar system).
(the full article : https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-juno-spacecraft-enters-jupiters-magnetic-field ) Some ''similar'' sounds are also present on earth with for example the reverberation if radio waves emitted by lightning.
I'm trying to find a clean, concise, factual video of pulsar pulses but the top results on youtube are all fake clickbait bullshit. Where are the videos from professor so-and-so with 10 subscribers of simple black and white graphs.
(this page has what I'm looking for but afaik none of these videos are on youtube)
Image of IC 405 aka the Flaming Star Nebula This is an emission (the red part) and reflection (the blue part) nebula. It's relatively bright for a nebula with visual magnitude of +6.
The bright star at the center of the blue reflection nebula is AE Aurigae, it's the star responsible for the ionisation of the gas in this nebula. AE Aurigae is what's known as a runaway star, those are star that moves at high speed compared to their surrounding environment. They are the result of gravitational interaction between stars or stars being ejected by nearby supernovae. In the case of AE Aurigae, it was probably ejected due to gravitational interaction, its path has been traced back to the Orion Nebula from which it was ejected about 2 million years ago.
The moon was nearly full and somewhat close by when I took the photos, so it was a bit tricky to process them. As a result, the reflection part of the nebula was not as visible as I would have liked but I think the overall result is not too bad.
Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera. 6x300s image for each colour filter (LRGB) and 12x300s for the Ha filter, total imaging time 3h, stacking and processing done in PixInsight.
Tried applying the Ortonglow script in PixInsight to give the nebula a bit more depth, but I don't like the halos it gave around the bright stars on the left.
This is the heart nebula (or at least as much of it as I can take with my setup without doing a mosaic) also known as IC 1805 or NGC 896. It is around 7 000 light years from us, in the constellation Cassiopeia. Despite its distance to us it still appears about twice as big as the moon in the sky, which speaks volumes when it comes to its actual size (about 200 light years in diameter).
This being an emission nebula its light mostly comes from gasses ionised by nearby stars.
This nebula also has an open cluster at it's center (a bit closer to us than the rest of the nebula), Melotte 15:
This cluster is bout 1,5 million years old which is very young for such a stellar object. It is composed a a few very heavy and bright stars and many fainter lighter stars.
The starless version :
(Image taken using a CarbonStar 150/600 newtonian telescope with a 0.95 coma corrector, ZWO ASI294 monochrome camera and Baader 6.5nm narrowband filter. 25x300s for the Ha filter, 26x300s for the SII filter and 26x300s for the OIII filter, total imaging time 6h 25min, stacking and processing done in PixInsight. Photo taken mid-January) Other versions with a different colour combinations (a bit less pleased of how they turned out).
If you want to see the nebula in its entirety, you can check out this NASA Astronomy picture of the day made by Adam Jensen.
Friendly reminder that CRT TVs were basically a particule accelerator you had in your living room. They used power supple capable of delivering tens if not hundreds of thousands of volts, to accelerate the electron that were quite literally being boiled of a glowing piece of metal.
They sometime used a lead infused glass as the front plate to limite if not eliminate the small amount of X-ray they emitted towards you.
They had to be heavy because of the thickness of the glass needed to resist the distance of pressure between the atmosphere and extremely low vacuum inside the vacuum tube. It's that difference of pressure that would result in them exploding in a shower of glass shrapnell if the tube was broken.
“the arts and sciences are completely separate fields that should be pitted against each other” the overlap of the arts and sciences make up our entire perceivable reality they r fucking on the couch
Listen to the sound of wikipedia
This is a way to listen to changes to wikipedia. You are literally listening to knowledge being added to the world.
Pluck sounds are an addition, strings are subtractions, and the pitch says how how big the edit is. My heart shudders at this I love it so much.
I've worked in a chemistry lab, they had a room with all the analysis and purification equipment. There was a constant noise due to the various pumps (vacuum, solvent, ...) and valves. After just a few days working there I could telle exactly with machin was doing what task and at what point it was in that process just based upon the noise they made.
A quick and (very) dirty mosaic of the H alpha photos I had already taken for the three major components of the Cygnus loop.
I wanted to have an idea of what a future mosaic of this target could look like (probably won't be able to do better than that before the end of the year or next summer unfortunately)
Thought I could post it here while I finish processing newer photos.
Astrophotographer & chemist, mid 20'sCurrently on the roof yelling at the clouds to get out of the wayMostly astrophotos I've taken, possibly other science related stuff
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