The 2012 Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition winners Australian based photographer Martin Pugh has claimed the top prize in the Royal Observatory’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition for the second time, after originally winning the accolade back in 2009. As well as securing the £1,500 top prize, his image takes pride of place in the exhibition of winning photographs opening at the Royal Observatory Greenwich on 20 September. Pugh impressed the judges in this year’s competition with the depth and clarity of his winning shot depicting the famous Whirlpool Galaxy (M51). Deep Space category winner, and overall winner: M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy by Martin Pugh (Australia) Picture: Martin Pugh
The Cosmic Hand of Destruction This picture is so totally freaking cool I have half a mind not to explain, and just make you stare at it and boggle at just how freaking cool it is. But of course I must explain it! First off, what is it? Obviously, it’s a giant blue hand reaching for a giant piece of cosmic smoked salmon! Dr. OK, duh, it’s a nebula, a vast structure of gas several light years across and located about 17,000 light years away from Earth. If you look at the wrist of the hand, you’ll see a brighter swirl of gas. Egads. So how does that teeny tiny neutron star form this huge structure? It’s the magnetic field coupled with the rotation of the star. The gas colored red in this false-color image is from a nebula named RCW 89, which is leftover gas from the original explosion of the supernova that formed the neutron star. But look at the red nebula: see how there are lots of hot spots, arranged in a loop or a horseshoe? The energies involved here are nothing short of mind-numbing.
Radio telescopes capture best-ever snapshot of black hole jets An international team, including NASA-funded researchers, using radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere has produced the most detailed image of particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy. "These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain themselves," said Cornelia Mueller, the study's lead author and a doctoral student at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. The new image shows a region less than 4.2 light-years across -- less than the distance between our sun and the nearest star. Mueller and her team targeted Centaurus A (Cen A), a nearby galaxy with a supermassive black hole weighing 55 million times the sun's mass. Seen in radio waves, Cen A is one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon. (Photo Credit: ESO/WFI (visible); MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al.
photo 'Brighter than a full moon': The biggest star of 2013... could be the comet of the century - Science - News Comet Ison could draw millions out into the dark to witness what could be the brightest comet seen in many generations – brighter even than the full Moon. It was found as a blur on an electronic image of the night sky taken through a telescope at the Kislovodsk Observatory in Russia as part of a project to survey the sky looking for comets and asteroids – chunks of rock and ice that litter space. Astronomers Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok were expecting to use the International Scientific Optical Network's (Ison) 40cm telescope on the night of 20 September but clouds halted their plans. It was a frustrating night but about half an hour prior to the beginning of morning twilight, they noticed the sky was clearing and got the telescope and camera up and running to obtain some survey images in the constellations of Gemini and Cancer. When the images were obtained Nevski loaded them into a computer program designed to detect asteroids and comets moving between images.