TYB
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
Nov 29 2022
The Gum Nebula Supernova Remnant
Because the Gum Nebula is the closest supernova remnant, it is actually hard to see. Spanning 40 degrees across the sky, the nebula appears so large and faint that it is easily lost in the din of a bright and complex background. The Gum Nebula is highlighted nicely in red emission toward the right of the featured wide-angle, single-image photograph taken in late May. Also visible in the frame are the Atacama Desert in Chile in the foreground, the Carina Nebula in the plane of our Milky Way galaxy running diagonally down from the upper left, and the neighboring Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) galaxy. The Gum Nebula is so close that we are much nearer the front edge than the back edge, each measuring 450 and 1500 light years respectively. The complicated nebula lies in the direction of the constellations of Puppis and Vela. Oddly, much remains unknown about the Gum Nebula, including the timing and even number of supernova explosions that formed it.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
Highlights From the First 13 Days of NASA's Artemis I Moon Mission
On Monday, Nov. 28, 2022, Artemis I reached the halfway point of its 26-day mission around the Moon, flying roughly 270,000 miles (434,000 km) from the Earth—farther from our home planet than any spacecraft designed to send humans to space and back has gone before.
From Artemis I's launch at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, to its first "Earthrise", to close-up views of the lunar surface, take a look back at some of the highlights from the first half of this mission.
https://youtu.be/e8JQXMjPOpQ
https://www.nasa.gov/specials/artemis-i/
Xi doing some pre-spring cleaning?
Hubble Spies Sparkling Spray of Stars in NGC 2660
This glittering group of stars, shining through the darkness like sparks left behind by a firework, is NGC 2660 in the constellation Vela, best viewed in the southern sky. NGC 2660 is an open cluster, a type of star cluster that can contain anywhere from tens to a few hundreds of stars loosely bound together by gravity. The stars of open clusters form out of the same region of gas and dust and thus share many characteristics, such as age and chemical composition. Unlike globular clusters – their ancient, denser, and more tightly-packed cousins – open clusters are easier to study since astronomers can more easily distinguish between individual stars. Their stars can be old or young, and they may disperse after a few million years into the spiral or irregular galaxies where they are born.
The spikes surrounding many of the stars in this image are “diffraction spikes,” which occur when the glow from bright points of light reflects off of Hubble's secondary mirror support. The bright red object to the left with the very prominent diffraction spikes is a foreground star that is not part of the cluster. Hubble observed this open cluster as part of a program to study the ages of white dwarf stars in open clusters.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-spies-sparkling-spray-of-stars-in-ngc-2660