One of the coolest pictures I've seen from space...

This is the Eagle Nebula.



I can't look at it without seeing the creature holding the star. Looks like he has glasses on.
I turned the photo 90 deg.


[Edited on 6-3-2004 by kinglizard]

[Edited on 6-3-2004 by kinglizard]

heres a pic of the old man nebula. pretty cool.

[Edited on 6-3-2004 by JustAnIllusion]

well you beat me to it...

but i was going to emphasize the face of christ, or the devil, depending who you are just below that star.

EDIT: by the way, that isn't even the entire eagle nebula. here's it in it's entirety





[Edited on 3/6/2004 by cmdrkeenkid]

That sure is an amazing site. It looks like animal fur or something.

This is one of my favorites. It is eta Carinae imaged from the HST.

[

not to sound dumb but are these paintings or real pictures because these are truly breathetaking

Sweet, its like looking at those ultracloseups of everyday objects and truly seeing the beauty of nature.

Or something

I believe those are all pics not artist drawings. Were they all taken with the Hubble Space Telescope? Great pics. I hadn't seen the first ones with the expanding light echos of dust if that is what it is called.

It's hard to imagine a dust cloud only starting it's expansion and it's already 6 light years across. For perspective (correct me if I'm wrong) I remember reading if the sun were a beach ball, the earth would be a speck of dust almost right next to it. The nearest star would be miles away. Considering the nearest star is around 4 light years away from Earth, this dust cloud would be even 2 light years farther out if stretched from the Earth out. I wonder how big it will get and still be visible. Again thanks for showing the great pics I hope they can get funding restored for Hubble Space Telescope maintenance.

sarcastic comment: Just think of all the money the government could save by not doing any more vehicle maintenance.

it's not so much the funding for maintaining the telescope, but all the new regulations concerning shuttle flights. that's really what sealed the hubble's demise.

Originally posted by JustAnIllusion


heres a pic of the old man nebula. pretty cool.

[Edited on 6-3-2004 by JustAnIllusion]

That one is incredible. Well, they all are!

With a lot of space photography the color is added of enhanced after the photo is taken. So some of the photos are an artists conception backed up with science.

Teasing color

With many objects and phenomena in space, color is only made visible by the power of a telescope. Planetary nebulae provide a good example. These bizarre and detailed structures -- often symmetrical bubbles or hourglass shapes -- are the result of gas that's been cast into space by a dying star. Different gases, such as oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, each generate a different wavelength, or color, depending on the local physical conditions.

Human eyes, even if very near to or inside one of these nebulae, could not make out the colors, however, because the emissions are too faint. They would see little more than a big gray area.

Hubble astronomers make multiple long exposures to draw out these colors. They also employ a different filter for each exposure to block all but a certain color of light. A digital imager records a grayscale image. After adding the color in Photoshop (and also eliminating artifacts generated by piecing the data together) the filtered images are combined.

In some cases, the colors are as true to reality as anyone could imagine. Other times, as with the Eagle Nebula, colors are changed for effect. Hydrogen and sulfur were each detected in red tones, so the hydrogen, which involved a shorter wavelength, was made green.

When images are taken outside the visible light spectrum -- in the infrared, for example -- the color choices are entirely up to the astronomers and photo processors.

"This is a representation of some kind to convey the information that Hubble has gathered," Brecher says. "It's scientifically sound, but their presentation is subjective."

Levay says the process of coloring photos is never arbitrary.

"What we're doing is representing physical processes and representing actual astronomical observations in a visual and artistic way," Levay explained shortly after discussing the issue with Brecher. "I'm adding value, but it's not arbitrarily added. What I'm mostly doing is enhancing what's already there."

This Voyager image of Saturn's rings had its color significantly goosed to highlight subtle differences.



This Hubble image of four colliding galaxies, released in earlier this month, was created mostly with infrared light. Astronomers mixed some visible light taken with the telescope's optical imager, too. The visible light was recorded as yellow but made blue before being combined with this picture.



In Hubble's classic Pillars of Creation photo, made in 1995, astronomers changed some of the red emissions they detected to green in order to highlight information that would otherwise have been lost amid other red emissions.

Originally posted by kinglizard
This is the Eagle Nebula.



I can't look at it without seeing the creature holding the star. Looks like he has glasses on.
I turned the photo 90 deg.


[Edited on 6-3-2004 by kinglizard]

[Edited on 6-3-2004 by kinglizard]

If you flip it 90 degrees to the left, you can see Brendan from Cartoon Network's Home Movies.

Is the old man nebula real? It just looks so conveniently perfect! If it is real, it is truly astonishing.

Hubble's Deepest-Ever View of the Universe Unveils Myriad Galaxies Back to the Beginning of Time. Several hundred never before seen galaxies are visible in this "deepest-ever" view of the universe, called the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Hold a grain of sand at arms length, that is the area of space that this photo represents.

The Pillars are my all time favorite and the Horsehead Nebula.

Instead of starting a new thread, here is another good picture I have found. It is a new one of Saturn that is great...follow the link...

www.newscientist.com...

Beautiful picture, but a little creepy.