Astronomy Tuesday

I have posted many gorgeous images through the years, but this one may be my favorite; it looks like an abstract painting I would love to hang on my wall. It's one of a series of images taken by the MeerKAT telescope at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) and shows the center of our Milky Way galaxy, including the giant black hole at the core, in radio emissions.

Radio emissions are just another kind of electomagnetic radiation (EMR), like the visible spectrum, and light like infrared or ultraviolet that our eyes can't see. A lot of astronomical images use the non-visible types of EMR to show us different views of galaxies and nebulae and other objects, but I haven't seen that many radio images. Some of the MeerKAT pictures have been “translated” into color, and look more like the usual images I post, but this one is in grayscale, with color only for the strongest emissions. And it's beautiful.

Credit: I. Heywood, SARAO

Astronomy Tuesday

This is M24, but unlike most of the items in M. Messier's catalog, it's not a nebula or a galaxy.

Instead it's a gap in the dark interstellar dust, through which the stars in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way are visible. So it appears to be a star cluster, but it's actually a window to something much larger -- thousands of stars, ten thousand light years away.

Image Credit and Copyright: Roberto Colombari

Astronomy Tuesday

This wonderful image of the Milky Way was captured here on Earth (near the Paranal Observatory in Chile, to be a little more specific), with the assistance of a tripod and a crystal ball.

When I despair of humanity, which is sadly often these days, it's nice to get reminders like this of our infinite creativity and capacity to appreciate beauty.

Image Credit and Copyright: Juan Carlos Munoz

Astronomy Tuesday

And speaking of Australia....

This otherwordly landscape beneath the literally otherworldly Milky Way is Nambung National Park, on the west coast near Perth, a good half continent away from the touristy east coast and central desert sites I'll be visiting in a few weeks. Those limestone pillars are called the Pinnacles, and they're the oddly eroded remains of ancient seabeds.

Image credit: Michael Goh