Very busy today so I only have time to share a this stunning picture, the overall winner of the 2020 Astronomy Photographer of the Year, Andromeda Galaxy at Arm’s Length? by Nicolas Lefaudeux (France).
Photo credit: Nicolas Lefaudeux/2020 astronomy photographer of the year
Episode 4, in which I show that spiral galaxies are very grubby – they contain huge amounts of dust. And not only galaxies – astronomical dust is everywhere we look. The Universe may be big, but it sure is dirty..
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This afternoon I gave three hours of lectures on the trot, so I’m now feeling more than a little knackered. Before I head home for an early night, though, I thought I’d share this amazing video produced by the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Survey (or PHAT, for short), which is a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Multi-cycle program to map roughly a third of the star-forming disk of the Andromeda Nebula (M31), using 6 filters covering from the ultraviolet through the near infrared. With HST’s resolution and sensitivity, the disk of M31 is resolved into more than 100 million stars. The combination of scale and detail is simply jaw-dropping. Hat’s off to the PHAT team!
Follow @telescoperAn amazing composite image of M31 in Andromeda using both infra-red and X-rays was recently obtained using Herschel and XMM space observatories. It featured in the BBC Stargazing Live programme earlier this week and I’m told that, typically for astronomy, the inspiration behind it was … beer.
via The Herschel Space Observatory
