Titan’s Atmosphere

Titan's Atmosphere as see by Cassini. Click the image for a much larger and pretty dial up friendly version. Image: Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

It’s a pretty thick atmosphere.

The caption from the Cassini site:

From the dark side of Titan, the Cassini spacecraft profiles the moon’s atmosphere as sunlight filters through its upper hazes.

An airless satellite would appear in this viewing geometry only as a lit crescent. But Titan’s thick atmosphere scatters light around all edges of the planet to create a ring of light.

Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this full color view of Titan at high phase. The color in the image on the right has been computer enhanced to bring out the outer haze layer, and the contrast in both images has been enhanced.

This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan. North on Titan is up and rotated 45 degrees to the left. The images were acquired at a distance of approximately 1.8 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Titan and at a Sun-Titan-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 157 degrees. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov . The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org .

M33 from Spitzer

M33 as seen by Spitzer. Click for a larger and annotated version. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Ariz.

This is a naked eye galaxy with dark skies, can’t prove it by me, but I know for sure it can be seen with binoculars. At the moment M-33 isn’t really easy to see because it is following the Sun and is close to setting itself by the time it gets dark enough so it don’t really make any difference.

Of course Spitzer makes the difference, producing an image that includes infrared. That’s what threw me off. Cool Cosmos has a nice page featuring on of my favorite galaxies the Sombrero galaxy (M-104), showing the difference looking at multiple wavelengths can make.

If you want larger versions of the image click the link to the Spitzer site below.

Here’s the press release from the Spitzer site:

One of our closest galactic neighbors shows its awesome beauty in this new image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. M33, also known as the Triangulum Galaxy, is a member of what’s known as our Local Group of galaxies. Along with our own Milky Way, this group travels together in the universe, as they are gravitationally bound. In fact, M33 is one of the few galaxies that is moving toward the Milky Way despite the fact that space itself is expanding, causing most galaxies in the universe to grow farther and farther apart.

When viewed with Spitzer’s infrared eyes, this elegant spiral galaxy sparkles with color and detail. Stars appear as glistening blue gems (several of which are actually foreground stars in our own galaxy), while dust rich in organic molecules glows green. The diffuse orange-red glowing areas indicate star-forming regions, while small red flecks outside the spiral disk of M33 are most likely distant background galaxies.

But not only is this new image beautiful, it also shows M33 to be surprising large - bigger than its visible-light appearance would suggest. With its ability to detect cold, dark dust, Spitzer can see emission from cooler material well beyond the visible range of M33’s disk. Exactly how this cold material moved outward from the galaxy is still a mystery, but winds from giant stars or supernovas may be responsible.

M33 is located about 2.9 million light-years away in the constellation Triangulum. This is a three-color composite image showing infrared observations from two of Spitzer instruments. Blue represents combined 3.6- and 4.5-micron light and green shows light of 8 microns, both captured by Spitzer’s infrared array camera. Red is 24-micron light detected by Spitzer’s multiband imaging photometer.

Hubble Contest Image

The Hubble Contest Winner - Arp 274. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Livio and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Remember the recent Hubble contest where we got to vote on the target to be imaged? Yeah the one that I lost hahahaha!

The image has been released and it was indeed a worthy subject. A good choice and a great job by Hubble and the people “behind” the telescope. Those people get little credit for their efforts, so here is my hat tip to them.

You can click the image above for a larger version. Be sure to check out Hubblesitefor the largest versions and a video.

The Hubble press release:

On April 1-2, the Hubble Space Telescope photographed the winning target in the Space Telescope Science Institute’s “You Decide” competition in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy (IYA). The winner is a group of galaxies called Arp 274. The striking object received 67,021 votes out of the nearly 140,000 votes cast for the six candidate targets.

This Week @ NASA

NASA TV

X-Ray Nebula

An X-Ray Nebula from Chandra. Image Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/P.Slane, et al.

Here’s an X-ray nebula courtesy of the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Want to see the same area in optical light? Click here (62K).

You gotta like pulsars. This one has a magnetic field estimated to be equal to the Earths TIMES 15,000,000,000,000!

The Chandra press release:

A small, dense object only twelve miles in diameter is responsible for this beautiful X-ray nebula that spans 150 light years. At the center of this image made by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is a very young and powerful pulsar, known as PSR B1509-58, or B1509 for short. The pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star which is spewing energy out into the space around it to create complex and intriguing structures, including one that resembles a large cosmic hand. In this image, the lowest energy X-rays that Chandra detects are red, the medium range is green, and the most energetic ones are colored blue. Astronomers think that B1509 is about 1700 years old and is located about 17,000 light years away.

Neutron stars are created when massive stars run out of fuel and collapse. B1509 is spinning completely around almost 7 times every second and is releasing energy into its environment at a prodigious rate - presumably because it has an intense magnetic field at its surface, estimated to be 15 trillion times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field.

The combination of rapid rotation and ultra-strong magnetic field makes B1509 one of the most powerful electromagnetic generators in the Galaxy. This generator drives an energetic wind of electrons and ions away from the neutron star. As the electrons move through the magnetized nebula, they radiate away their energy and create the elaborate nebula seen by Chandra.

In the innermost regions, a faint circle surrounds the pulsar, and marks the spot where the wind is rapidly decelerated by the slowly expanding nebula. In this way, B1509 shares some striking similarities to the famous Crab Nebula. However B1509’s nebula is 15 times wider than the Crab’s diameter of 10 light years.

Finger-like structures extend to the north, apparently energizing knots of material in a neighboring gas cloud known as RCW 89. The transfer of energy from the wind to these knots makes them glow brightly in X-rays (orange and red features to the upper right). The temperature in this region appears to vary in a circular pattern around this ring of emission, suggesting that the pulsar may be precessing like a spinning top and sweeping an energizing beam around the gas in RCW 89.

A Shadow on Stormy clouds

Shadown on the clouds. Click for larger (76K). Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Pretty nice image of the shadow of Enceladus on the turbulent clouds of Saturn. The Cassini spacecraft was 810,000 miles from Saturn when it took this picture, yet the image scale is about 4 miles per pixel.

Want to read the Cassini caption? Yeah? Go here.

Home With A Thud

Back home! Image: NASA (Image of the day)

Two members of the Expedition 18 crew and a space tourist returned to Earth from the International Space Station this morning — safe and sound. I always wonder about the thud at the end and how it compares to hitting water.

Astronaut Mike Fincke, cosmonaut Yury Lonchakov and tourist Charles Simonyi were inside the Soyuz spacecraft as it landed on the terra firma in southern Kazakahstan.

Fincke and Lonchakov left Expedition 19 Commander Gennady Padalka, Flight Engineer Mike Baratt and JAXA’s Koichi Wakata aboard the ISS. They will be joined in May by Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, Canadian Space Agency’s Robert Thirsk (way to go Canada!!) and ESA’s Frank De Winne. Together they will comprise the first six-person crew aboard the ISS. When they get together it will also be the fist time each of the five partners will be living on the ISS at the same time as a crew.