Hubble Views A Spectacular Supernova With Interstellar Material Over 160,000 Light-years Away By NASA

Saturn and Mars visit Milky Way Star Clouds

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M94, Cat’s Eye Galaxy

Mammoth stars seen by Hubble - WR 25 and Tr16-244, located within the open cluster Trumpler 16

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Juno Arrives at Jupiter Today!

Today on the 4th of July, 2016 (barring any tragic occurrence with the engine firing) NASA’s Juno spacecraft will enter into orbit around Jupiter.

It’s been traveling since 2011 and carries thick shielding to protect its instruments from the dangerous fields of radiation surrounding the planet.

Juno’s not the first spacecraft to go to Jupiter, but it will be the closest. I like to imagine that Juno will look like a scene from Alien: Isolation where you get to look out the window and see that massive gas giant below you.

The goals of this mission are essentially thus: investigate the weather, atmosphere and magnetosphere on Jupiter.

Moving into a grander context, as answers start to come in and we learn more about Jupiter’s nature we hope to learn more about the questions we must be asking in order to investigate the formation of our very solar system on a deeper level.

Of course with any luck and a lot of hard work, we will be able to build a more harmonious theory of how a star system forms, and the things that go into the construct of a massive gas giant.

(Image credit: NASA and JPL)

Bubble Nebula by Hubble Heritage Via Flickr: For the 26th birthday of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers are highlighting a Hubble image of an enormous bubble being blown into space by a super-hot, massive star. The Hubble image of the Bubble Nebula, or NGC 7635, was chosen to mark the 26th anniversary of the launch of Hubble into Earth orbit by the STS-31 space shuttle crew on April 24, 1990. The Bubble Nebula is 7 light-years across — about one-and-a-half times the distance from our sun to its nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. The Bubble Nebula was discovered in 1787 by William Herschel, a prominent British astronomer. It is being formed by a prototypical Wolf-Rayet star, an extremely bright, massive, and short-lived star that has lost most of its outer hydrogen and is now fusing helium into heavier elements. The star is about 4 million years old, and in 10 million to 20 million years, it will likely detonate as a supernova. 

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) heritage.stsci.edu/2016/13/ hubbledev.stsci.edu/newscenter/archive/releases/2016/13/

NGC 2736: The Pencil Nebula

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Crescent Nebula

Just Another Milky Way Shot Taken From Death Valley, CA

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Just so you know, you can always watch the Earth live from the ISS. Its really relaxing to me

Saturn in three bands of infrared light.