Magazine Posts

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

What created this unusual planetary nebula? Dubbed the Pillow Nebula and the Flying Carpet Nebula, NGC 7027 is one of the smallest, brightest, and most unusually shaped planetary nebulas known. Given its expansion rate, NGC 7027 first started expanding, as visible from Earth, about 600 years ago. For much of its history, the planetary nebula has been expelling shells, as seen in blue in the featured image by the Hubble Space Telescope. In modern times, though, for reasons unknown, it began ejecting gas and dust (seen in brown) in specific directions that created a new pattern that seems to have four corners. What lies at the nebula's center is unknown, with one hypothesis holding it to be a close binary star system where one star sheds gas onto an erratic disk orbiting the other star. NGC 7027, about 3,000 light years away, was first discovered in 1878 and can be seen with a standard backyard telescope toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).

Formula 1, Dutch Grand Prix 2024: Carlos Sainz jr (ESP, Scuderia Ferrari). Today is this year's Grand Prix.

Steffen Prößdorf, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

A young crescent moon can be hard to see. That's because when the Moon shows its crescent phase (young or old) it can never be far from the Sun in planet Earth's sky. But even though the sky is still bright, a slender sunlit lunar crescent is clearly visible in this early evening skyscape. The telephoto snapshot was captured on August 24, with the Moon very near the western horizon at sunset. Seen in a narrow crescent phase about 1.5 days old, the visible sunlit portion is a mere two percent of the surface of the Moon's familiar nearside. At the Canary Islands Space Centre, a steerable radio dish for communication with spacecraft is tilted in the direction of the two percent Moon. The sunset sky's pastel pinkish coloring is partly due to fine sand and dust from the Sahara Desert blown by the prevailing winds.

Photo by Marina Prol

A caterpillar of the spurge hawk moth (Hyles euphorbiae), photographed in the Scrivia riverbed, in Novi Ligure, Piedmont, Italy. The larvae of this Europiean hawk moth eat the leaves and bracts of the leafy spurge (Euphorbia virgata), which gives the species its common name.

Maurizio Carlini, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

The diffuse hydrogen-alpha glow of emission region Sh2-27 fills this cosmic scene. The field of view spans nearly 3 degrees across the nebula-rich constellation Ophiuchus toward the central Milky Way. A Dark Veil of wispy interstellar dust clouds draped across the foreground is chiefly identified as LDN 234 and LDN 204 from the 1962 Catalog of Dark Nebulae by American astronomer Beverly Lynds. Sh2-27 itself is the large but faint HII region surrounding runaway O-type star Zeta Ophiuchi. Along with the Zeta Oph HII region, LDN 234 and LDN 204 are likely 500 or so light-years away. At that distance, this telescopic frame would be about 25 light-years wide.

Photo by Katelyn Beecroft

American chocolates from Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory.

Wilfredo Rafael Rodriguez Hernandez, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day:

This well-composed telescopic field of view covers over a Full Moon on the sky toward the high-flying constellation Pegasus. Of course the brighter stars show diffraction spikes, the commonly seen effect of internal supports in reflecting telescopes, and lie well within our own Milky Way galaxy. The faint but pervasive clouds of interstellar dust ride above the galactic plane and dimly reflect the Milky Way's starlight. Known as galactic cirrus or integrated flux nebulae they are associated with the Milky Way's molecular clouds. In fact, the diffuse cloud cataloged as MBM 54, less than a thousand light-years distant, fills the scene. The galaxy seemingly tangled in the dusty cloud is the striking spiral galaxy NGC 7497. It's some 60 million light-years away, though. Seen almost edge-on near the center of the field, NGC 7497's own spiral arms and dust lanes echo the colors of stars and dust in our own Milky Way.

Photo by Robert Eder

TDK tape head cleaner cassette "HCL-11" made of clear hard plastic. The plastic is birefringent and demonstrates internal stress as coloured patterns (photoelasticity) when photographed using cross-polarisation. Invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch company Philips, the Compact Cassette was released on this date in August 1963.

Colin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. View source.