IN THE northern hemisphere, winter is still with us. That means dark nights and plenty of opportunity to look for fainter targets in the sky. In the southern hemisphere, nights are short, but stargazing is still possible. This week, we have two activitie
A nebula ais one of the most beautiful deep-sky objects in the night sky. But what is a nebula? And how do these space clouds form?
Views of the famous Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula (M16) in different wavelengths are showcased in this 3D flythrough. Credit: AstroViz Project/NASA’s Universe of Learning If you want to try your own hand at representative colorization, STScI makes JWST data and software ...
Radio waves are typically the length of a football field, but they can be even longer than our planet’s diameter. Though the 1,000-foot-wide dish at Arecibo collapsed in 2020 due to structural problems, other large telescopes carry on the work of looking at radio waves from space. Large...
"Wide field" alone isn't the actual term or nature of such an instrument. Rich field is. Eta Carina, the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Cloud of Sagittarius, just naming three more objects, these are not able to be shown in their true full magnificence without a a wide field rich field ...
Now imagine dumping one large bucket’s contents into a dollhouse-sized teacup to compress what was captured and present it in a format that we can perceive and our computers can display. Stretching Webb’s images allows image specialists to see variation in the pixel values and highlight the...
You should also bear in mind that some constellations cover large swaths of the sky while others are very small. For example, Delphinus, the Dolphin is tiny compared to its neighborCygnus, the Swan. Ursa Major is medium-sized but very recognizable. People use it to find Polaris,our pole st...
In every Webb image, each pixel can be one of over 65,000 different shades of gray. Think of Webb’s detectors like light buckets. As Webb observes, it collects everything it detects, filling its “buckets” with light. Now imagine dumping one large bucket’s contents into a dollhouse-si...