Viewing Galaxies

The lunar landscapes of Chile's Atacama Desert, which stretches for about 650 miles along the Pacific Ocean to the Peruvian Border, is generally considered the driest place on earth, wedged between the rain shadows of the Andes to the east and the coast ranges to the west, while the cold Humboldt Current off the coast suppresses evaporation from the ocean. There are places in the Atacama where there has been no recorded or observed rainfall in the 400+ years since the Spaniards first arrived... Read Full Story

Many of the recent discoveries by the Hubble Space Telescope have been "named" with numbers. Gone are the poetic, mythic names like Milky Way or Andromeda or Pegasus. Let's have some fun and help NASA out and create names for these awesome celestial objects. We'll select your best submissions and send them off to NASA headquarters. What's your name for: Spiral galaxies NGC 5426 and NGC 5427, which are passing perilously close to each other, but each is likely to survive the collision... Read Full Story

Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA); Acknowledgment: D. Carter (LJMU) et al. and the Coma HST ACS Treasury Team Explanation: Almost every object in the above photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured above is one of the densest clusters known - it contains thousands of galaxies. Each of these galaxies houses billions of stars - just as our own Milky Way Galaxy does. Although nearby when compared to most other clusters, light from the Coma Cluster still... Read Full Story

In the Heart of the Virgo Cluster Credit & Copyright: Günter Kerschhuber (Gahberg Observatory) Explanation: The Virgo Cluster of Galaxies is the closest cluster of galaxies to our Milky Way Galaxy. The Virgo Cluster is so close that it spans more than 5 degrees on the sky - about 10 times the angle made by a full Moon. With its heart lying about 70 million light years distant, the Virgo Cluster is the nearest cluster of galaxies, contains over 2,000 galaxies, and has a noticeable... Read Full Story

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a new image of a galaxy located approximately 320 million light-years away in the constellation of Eridanus, the River, which is, most likely, a cosmic fossil – the aftermath of an enormous multi-galactic pile-up, where the carnage of collision after collision has built up a brilliant giant elliptical galaxy far outshining typical galaxies. Scientists have found that NGC 1132 resides in an enormous halo of dark matter, comparable to the amount of... Read Full Story

Space is big. Like, really big (and here we'll deviate from the Hitchhikers Guide), so unimaginably vast that even light can take a long time to get around the place.  This turns the sky into a live-action cross section of history - we might see everything right now, but the further away something is the longer that light took to reach us and the further back in time what we see now actually happened.  And it's hard to go much further back than the snappily titled A1689-zD1, a galaxy whose... Read Full Story

According to sources close to Microsoft,  the company will launch new desktop software called WorldWide Telescope on February 27 at the TED Conference in Monterey, California. Microsoft is said to be tapping the Hubble telescope as well as ten or so earth bound telescopes around the world for data. When you find an area you like, you can switch to a number of different views, such as infrared and non-visible light. Rumors report that users will be able to pan around the nighttime sky and... Read Full Story