Hubble Space Telescope 29th anniversary Image , the Southern Crab Nebula

To celebrate the 29th year of our special little window to the Universe NASA have released this colourful image of the Southern Crab Nebula , the image was taken last month.

The nebula, officially known as Hen 2-104, is located several thousand light-years from Earth in the southern hemisphere constellation of Centaurus. It appears to have two nested hourglass-shaped structures that were sculpted by a whirling pair of stars in a binary system.

The duo consists of an aging red giant star and a burned-out star, a white dwarf. The red giant is shedding its outer layers. Some of this ejected material is attracted by the gravity of the companion white dwarf
hubblesite.org...

Happy anniversary team and keep em coming.

a reply to: gortex
Thank you for sharing this.
Great photo.... money well spent on the HST and the upgrades done later.

Pretty thing!


www.youtube.com...

An image from Chilean Advanced Robotic Telescope: www.chart32.de...



My edit: Hubble image with colour information from the image above:

a reply to: gortex

That is so cool! Thanks for sharing it here, I can't believe it is 29 years. These are the kind of posts I love on ATS

Think of the energy we would need to create a explosion of that size..

At least two sticks of dynamite !

a reply to: gortex

a reply to: gortex

We need a “Butter Nebula” just in case the cook doesn’t know how to cook it!!



That is awesome! And a good reason to over engineer instruments! Oppy being another good example (besides Voyagers, of course)!

Makes shooting a car into orbit seem... uh, erm, uh... yeah. Look at the time!

originally posted by: Spacespider
Think of the energy we would need to create a explosion of that size..

At least two sticks of dynamite !

Nah, at least two and a half i reckon...

And thank you Hubble t-scope for opening up the wonders of the universe to us humble wee humans!

I don't know but I have this feeling that we are imagining the logistics of traveling to these stunning universal
vistas as being much harder and further than it will turn out to be in actuality, once we unlock the secret knowledge....
For example I believe that we have the concepts of light year distances all wrong( vaguely remember a quote along these lines from one of the Lockheed skunk works honchos?)and space/time calculations vs reality will turn out to be alot more user friendly than expected.
Maybe more to do with consciousness than physics perhaps?(the possibilities are endless, particularly with our present knowledge of space which is pretty much next to nothing!)
Hopefully one day we'll find out if I'm right or way off.....