"For all of you who like to geek out on details, here's what's featured in the pop ups! :
1. Sombrero Galaxy
The Sombrero Galaxy (also known as M104 or NGC 4594) is an unbarred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo. It has a bright nucleus, an unusually large central bulge, and a prominent dust lane in its inclined disk. The dark dust lane and the bulge give this galaxy the appearance of a sombrero. The galaxy has an apparent magnitude of 9.0, making it a galaxy that can easily be seen with amateur telescopes. The large bulge, the central supermassive black hole, and the dust lane all attract the attention of professional astronomers.
2. Arp 87 (Dancing Galaxies)
A pair of galaxies, known collectively as Arp 87, is on of hundreds of interacting and merging galaxies known in our nearby universe.
Two galaxies perform an intricate dance in this new Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxies, containing a vast number of stars, swing past each other in a graceful performance choreographed by gravity.
3. Saturn
Saturn, the second most massive planet, and the most distant planet known to the ancients, is one of the most beautiful sites in the Solar System, as witnessed by the adjacent image. The most striking feature of Saturn is the spectacular ring system. Although this feature is no longer unique, since we now know that all the Gas Giant planets have rings, the rings of Saturn are much more elaborate than those of any of the other planets. Saturn shares many features with its even larger Gas Giant neighbor Jupiter, but has various unique features in its own right.
4. Planetary Nebula (non gloss edition)
A planetary nebula forms when a star can no longer support itself by fusion reactions in its center. The gravity from the material in the outer part of the star takes its inevitable toll on the structure of the star, and forces the inner parts to condense and heat up. The high temperature central regions drive the outer half of the star away in a brisk stellar wind, lasting a few thousand years. When the process is complete, the remaining core remnant is uncovered and heats the now distant gases and causes them to glow.
5. Jupiter and its Moons
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and by far the largest. Jupiter is more than twice as massive as all the other planets combined (the mass of Jupiter is 318 times that of Earth).
Jupiter is the fourth brightest object in the sky (after the Sun, the Moon and Venus). It has been known since prehistoric times as a bright "wandering star". But in 1610 when Galileo first pointed a telescope at the sky he discovered Jupiter's four large moons Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto (now known as the Galilean moons) and recorded their motions back and forth around Jupiter. This was the first discovery of a center of motion not apparently centered on the Earth.
The planet Jupiter's four largest moons are called the Galilean satellites, after Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who observed them in 1610. The German astronomer Simon Marius claimed to have seen the moons around the same time, but he did not publish his observations and so Galileo is given the credit for their discovery. These large moons, named Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, are each distinctive worlds.
6. Spiral Galaxy
Spiral galaxies consist of a flat, rotating disk of stars, gas and dust, and a central concentration of stars known as the bulge. These are surrounded by a much fainter halo of stars, many of which reside in globular clusters.
7. The Center of the Southern Crab Nebula He2-104
A tempestuous relationship between an unlikely pair of stars may have created an oddly shaped gaseous nebula that resembles nesting hourglasses.
Images taken with Earth-based telescopes have shown the larger, hourglass-shaped nebula. But this picture, taken with the Hubble telescope, reveals a small, bright nebula embedded in the center of the larger one [close-up of nebula in inset]. Astronomers have dubbed the entire nebula the "Southern Crab Nebula" (He2-104), because, from ground-based telescopes, it looks like the body and legs of a crab. The nebula is several light-years long. The possible creators of these shapes cannot be seen in this visible-light picture. It's a pair of aging stars buried in the glow of the tiny, central nebula. One of them is a red giant, a bloated star that is exhausting its nuclear fuel and is shedding its outer layers in a powerful stellar wind. Its companion is a hot, white dwarf, a stellar zombie of a burned-out star.
8. Cosmic Tornado
Light-years in length, this cosmic tornado is actually a powerful jet cataloged as HH (Herbig-Haro) 49/50. Though such energetic outflows are well known to be associated with the formation of young stars, the exact cause of the spiraling structures apparent in this case is still mysterious. The embryonic star responsible for the 62 mile per second jet is located just off the top of the picture, while the bright star seen near the tip of the jet may just by chance lie along the line of sight. HH49/50 is about 450 light-years distant, located in the Chamaeleon I molecular cloud.
9. Boomerang Nebula
The Boomerang Nebula (also called the Bow Tie Nebula) is a protoplanetary nebula resides 5,000 light-years from Earth, in the Centaurus constellation. The nebula is measured at 1 kelvin, the coldest place known outside a laboratory. The Boomerang Nebula was formed from the outflow of gas from a star at its core. The gas is moving outwards at a speed of about 164 km/s and expanding rapidly as it moves out into space. This expansion is the cause of the nebula's very low temperature.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope caught the Boomerang Nebula in images taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys in early 2005. This reflecting cloud of dust and gas has two nearly symmetric lobes of matter that are being ejected from a central star. Each lobe of the nebula is nearly one light-year in length, making the total length of the nebula half as long as the distance from our Sun to our nearest neighbors- the Alpha Centauri stellar system, located roughly 4 light-years away. Hubble's sharp view is able to resolve patterns and ripples in the nebula very close to the central star that are not visible from the ground.
10. Star Cluster
Star clusters are groups of stars which are gravitationally bound. Two distinct types of star cluster can be distinguished: globular clusters are tight groups of hundreds of thousands of very old stars, while open clusters generally contain less than a few hundred members, and are often very young. Open clusters become disrupted over time by the gravitational influence of giant molecular clouds as they move through the galaxy, but cluster members will continue to move in broadly the same direction through space even though they are no longer gravitationally bound; they are then known as a stellar association, sometimes also referred to as a moving group.
Thanks:
NASA, ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
NASA/JPL-Caltech/J. Bally (Univ. of Colorado) et al.
Hubblesite.org
myspace.com/o1o
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