Comet Lovejoy, Meteor, Pleiades, California Nebula and Milky Way seen over La Silla Observatory

Comet Lovejoy, Meteor, Pleiades, California Nebula and Milky Way seen over La Silla Observatory

In this ESO image, nightfall raises the curtain on a theatrical display taking place in the cloudless skies over La Silla.

In a scene humming with activity, the major players captured here are Comet Lovejoy, glowing green in the centre of the image; the Pleiades above and to the right; and the California Nebula, providing some contrast in the form of a red arc of gas directly to the right of Lovejoy.

A meteor adds its own streak of light to the scene, seeming to plunge into the hazy pool of green light collecting along the horizon.

The telescopes of La Silla provide an audience for this celestial performance, and a thin shroud of low altitude cloud clings to the plain below the observatory streaked by the Panamericana Highway.

Comet Lovejoy’s long tail is being pushed away from the comet by the solar wind. Carbon compounds that have been excited by ultraviolet radiation from the Sun give it its striking green hue.

This is the first time the comet has passed through the inner Solar System and ignited so spectacularly in over 11 000 years. Its highly elliptical orbit about the Sun — adjusted slightly due to meddling planets — means that it will not grace our skies for another 8000 years once it has rounded the Sun and begun its lonely voyage back into the cold outer regions of the Solar System.

This image was taken by ESO Photo Ambassador Petr Horálek during a visit to La Silla in January 2015. The sky in this image was captured with a series of long exposures, resulting in the wonderful vista of the comet in the sky. However, the bottom half uses only one of these exposures in order to retain the sharpness of the La Silla landscape.

Image Credit: P. Horálek/ESO
Explanation from: https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw1504a/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Exoplanet WASP-39b

Image
An international team of scientists has used the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to study the atmosphere of the hot exoplanet WASP-39b. By combining this new data with older data they created the most complete study yet of an exoplanet atmosphere. The atmospheric composition of WASP-39b hints that the formation processes of exoplanets can be very different from those of our own Solar System giants. Investigating exoplanet atmospheres can provide new insight into how and where planets form around a star. “We need to look outward to help us understand our own Solar System,” explains lead investigator Hannah Wakeford from the University of Exeter in the UK and the Space Telescope Science Institute in the USA. Therefore the British-American team combined the capabilities of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope with those of other ground- and space-based telescopes for a detailed study of the exoplanet WASP-39b. They have produced the most complete spectrum of an exoplanet’s atmosphere poss...
Read more

Early Earth

Image
The early Earth is loosely defined as Earth in its first one billion years, or gigayear. On the geologic time scale, this comprises all of the Hadean eon (starting with the formation of the Earth about 4.6 billion years ago), as well as the Eoarchean (starting 4 billion years ago) and part of the Paleoarchean (starting 3.6 billion years ago) eras of the Archean eon. This period of Earth's history involved the planet's formation from the solar nebula via a process known as accretion. This time period included intense meteorite bombardment as well as giant impacts, including the Moon-forming impact, which resulted in a series of magma oceans and episodes of core formation. After formation of the core, delivery of meteoritic or cometary material in a "late veneer" may have delivered water and other volatile compounds to the Earth. Although little crustal material from this period survives, the oldest dated specimen is a zircon mineral of 4.404 ± 0.008 Ga enclosed in a me...
Read more

Globular Cluster Messier 79

Image
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of a blizzard of stars, which resembles a swirling storm in a snow globe. These stars make up the globular cluster Messier 79, located about 40 000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Lepus (The Hare). Globular clusters are gravitationally bound groupings of up to one million stars. These giant “star globes” contain some of the oldest stars in our galaxy. Messier 79 is no exception; it contains about 150 000 stars, packed into an area measuring just roughly 120 light-years across. This 11.7-billion-year-old star cluster was first discovered by French astronomer Pierre Méchain in 1780. Méchain reported the finding to his colleague Charles Messier, who included it in his catalogue of non-cometary objects: The Messier catalogue. About four years later, using a larger telescope than Messier’s, William Herschel was able to resolve the stars in Messier 79 and described it as a “globular star ...
Read more