Behold: The Carina Nebula's 'Mystic Mountain'

Within the tempestuous Carina Nebula lies “Mystic Mountain.” This three-light-year-tall cosmic pinnacle, imaged by Hubble in 2010.

from NASA http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/behold-the-carina-nebulas-mystic-mountain
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Andromeda over the Sahara Desert

What is the oldest thing you can see? At 2.5 million light years distant, the answer for the unaided eye is the Andromeda galaxy, because its photons are 2.5 million years old when they reach you. Most other apparent denizens of the night sky -- stars, clusters, and nebulae -- appear as they were only a few hundred to a few thousand years ago, as they lie well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. Given its distance, light from Andromeda is likely also the farthest object that you can see. Also known as M31, the Andromeda Galaxy dominates the center of the featured zoomed image, taken from the Sahara Desert in Morocco last month. The featured image is a combination of three background and one foreground exposure -- all taken with the same camera and from the same location and on the same calendar day -- with the foreground image taken during the evening blue hour. M110, a satellite galaxy of Andromenda is visible just above and to the left of M31's core. As cool as it may be to see this neighboring galaxy to our Milky Way with your own eyes, long duration camera exposures can pick up many faint and breathtaking details. Recent data indicates that our Milky Way Galaxy will collide and combine with the similarly-sized Andromeda galaxy in a few billion years.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220711.html ( July 11, 2022)

In the Center of the Cats Eye Nebula

Three thousand light-years away, a dying star throws off shells of glowing gas. This image from the Hubble Space Telescope reveals the Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543), to be one of the most complex planetary nebulae known. Spanning half a light-year, the features seen in the Cat's Eye are so complex that astronomers suspect the bright central object may actually be a binary star system. The term planetary nebula, used to describe this general class of objects, is misleading. Although these objects may appear round and planet-like in small telescopes, high resolution images with large telescopes reveal them to be stars surrounded by cocoons of gas blown off in the late stages of stellar evolution. Gazing into this Cat's Eye, astronomers may well be seeing more than detailed structure, they may be seeing the fate of our Sun, destined to enter its own planetary nebula phase of evolution ... in about 5 billion years.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220710.html ( July 10, 2022)

Saturn and ISS

Soaring high in skies around planet Earth, bright planet Saturn was a star of June's morning planet parade. But very briefly on June 24 it posed with a bright object in low Earth orbit, the International Space Station. On that date from a school parking lot in Temecula, California the ringed-planet and International Space Station were both caught in this single high-speed video frame. Though Saturn was shining at +0.5 stellar magnitude the space station was an even brighter -3 on the magnitude scale. That difference in brightness is faithfully represented in the video capture frame. In the challenging image, the orbiting ISS was at a range of 602 kilometers. Saturn was about 1.4 billion kilometers from the school parking lot.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220709.html ( July 09, 2022)

ISS Daily Summary Report – 7/07/2022

 

Payloads: Grip: The crew performed the third and final day of the experiment session, transferred the data, and stowed the experiment hardware. The Grip experiment studies the long-duration spaceflight effects on the abilities of human subjects to regulate grip force and upper limbs trajectories when manipulating objects during different kinds of movements: oscillatory movements, rapid … ...

July 07, 2022 at 12:00PM
From NASA: https://blogs.nasa.gov/stationreport/2022/07/07/iss-daily-summary-report-7-07-2022/

Hubble Spots a Merging Galactic Gem

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observation has captured the galaxy CGCG 396-2, an unusual multi-armed galaxy merger which lies around 520 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion.

from NASA http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2022/hubble-spots-a-merging-galactic-gem
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Roots on a Rotating Planet

With roots on a rotating planet, an old tree is centered in this sequence of 137 exposures each 20 seconds long, recorded one night from northern Sicily. Digital camera and fisheye lens were fixed to a tripod to capture the dramatic timelapse, so the stars trailed through the region's dark sky. Of course that makes it easy to spot the planet's north celestial pole. The extension of Earth's axis of rotation into space is toward the upper left, at the center of the concentric star trail arcs. The Milky Way is there too. The plane of our galaxy stretches across the wide field of view from north to east (left to right) creating a broader luminous band of diffuse starlight.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220708.html ( July 08, 2022)

ISS Daily Summary Report – 7/06/2022

 

Payloads: Airborne Particulate Monitor (APM): Science data from the APM memory card was transferred to a Station Support Computer (SSC) for subsequent downlink, and the display status was reported to the ground. Air quality in crewed spacecraft is important for keeping astronauts healthy and comfortable. Although requirements exist for maximum allowable concentrations of particulate matter, … ...

July 06, 2022 at 12:00PM
From NASA: https://blogs.nasa.gov/stationreport/2022/07/06/iss-daily-summary-report-7-06-2022/

Countdown to the Webb Telescope's First Images

Webb’s Fine Guidance Sensor Provides a Serendipitous Preview

from NASA http://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/countdown-to-the-webb-telescopes-first-images
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The NGC 6914 Complex

A study in contrasts, this colorful skyscape features stars, dust, and glowing gas in the vicinity of NGC 6914. The interstellar complex of nebulae lies some 6,000 light-years away, toward the high-flying northern constellation Cygnus and the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. Obscuring interstellar dust clouds appear in silhouette while reddish hydrogen emission nebulae, along with the dusty blue reflection nebulae, fill the cosmic canvas. Ultraviolet radiation from the massive, hot, young stars of the extensive Cygnus OB2 association ionize the region's atomic hydrogen gas, producing the characteristic red glow as protons and electrons recombine. Embedded Cygnus OB2 stars also provide the blue starlight strongly reflected by the dust clouds. The over 1 degree wide telescopic field of view spans about 100 light-years at the estimated distance of NGC 6914.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220707.html ( July 07, 2022)