APOD 3.5

The Rosette Nebula
February 14th, 2011

Look at those stars.  The nebula is gorgeous, obviously, but this picture really accentuates the brightness and size of the stars located through the whole in the color.  It's almost as if the heavens are opening up.  This is a background worthy picture.  The stars inside are considered a cluster, and a relatively new one at that.  The stars stellar winds are clearing the hole in the nebula.  That is AWESOME.  Ultraviolet light from around the nebula causes it to glow.  It spans about 100 light years across and is approximately 5000 light years away from Earth.  It is located in the constellation Monoceros.

Observation 1

On February 14th, yes, Valentine's Day, I went to the beach to look up at the sky at around 9:00 oclock.  Out on the beach at night, with limited light around, is a great place to look at the stars.  The beauty really jumped out at me and for the first time I could locate and perfectly identify the red giant star in Orion, Betelgeuse. It was really cool actually seeing a redish tint to the star knowing that something so much larger than our Sun is out there and visible to me.

APOD 3.4

Hanny's Voorwerp
February 10th, 2011

This photo is also very intriguing as every posts' picture seems to be. Hanny's Voorwerp is Dutch for Hanny's object. This object is so massive that it is equal in size to our own Milky Way.  The green light is produced by the emission of oxygen atoms.  The picture was taken by the Hubble satellite.  These lie approximately 650 million light years away.  This distance comes to the point of completely unfathomable.  It's facts like this that confound my perception of the universe itself.  Also visible from this picture is a star forming region in the voorwerp.  

APOD 3.3

Zeta Oph: Runaway Star 
February 4th 2011

This picture is obviously very attractive and turns out to be as equally as intriguing.  This is an infrared portrait of what looks to be a plowing sea ship floating through the night sky.  In this falso color hue, Zeta Oph, which is originally blue, looks to be red.   The star in the center of the picture half masked behind the beauty of the redish tinted color is approximately 20 times the sun.  It actually moves at 24 kilometers a SECOND.  It's statistics like this that really blow my mind.

APOD 3.2

The Whirlpool Galaxy in Infrared Dust
2011, January 26th

This is a picture of M51, which is nearby, through the infared spectrum.  The dust that are highlighted when you move over the picture are what help to form stars. Also, much of the optical light was digitally removed.  The resulting pattern is a creation of swirls all across the picture which is extremely aesthetic and appealing to the human eye.  This M object lies about 30 million light years away.

APOD 3.1

2011 January 21: Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka

Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka are three bright bluish stars that scatter across the sky and shine extremely brightly.  You can't miss them.  They are captured beautifully in this picture as is shown.  The thing that really suprises me about this picture are all the other bright objects in the sky.  They are impossible to count they are so numerous.  This picture has a lot of great color and brightness. I like it.  The three major stars make up the belt of Orion which are very visible from Earth.  They are all much brighter and much more massive than the sun itself. The famous Orion nebula is located at the bottom of the solar system.

APOD 2.8

The Seagull Nebula: January 12th, 2011

Pretty.  This is probably the coolest looking nebula I've seen on Astronomy Picture of the Day's site.  It occurs in the night sky near Sirius and spans 1.6 angular degrees across the sky.  It's very close to the alpha star Canis Major.  The birds head is formed by a dusty emission region with an embedded massive star.    It is dominated by hydrogen which explains why it has a reddish tint from top to bottom.   It spans over 100 light years and is approximately 3,800 light years away.