APOD: Birthplace of massive stars August 29, 2008
Posted by sarah in: science . Add a commentToday’s APOD image is very impressive – AND taken in the infrared with the excellent Spitzer Space Telescope. It shows one of our galaxy’s best-known regions where massive stars are being born, called W5. It lies about 6500 light years away and measures over 200 light years across.
Generations of Stars in W5 Credit Lori Allen, Xavier Koenig (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA) et al., JPL-Caltech, NASA
GLAST first light: Update August 27, 2008
Posted by sarah in: science . Add a commentAfter diligently setting my watch for the NASA news telecon and getting comfortable on the couch, I realised that I couldn’t listen to the thing on an iPhone and had left my laptop at work (happens about once a month, good call woman). Doh.
GLAST first light: Listen live! August 25, 2008
Posted by sarah in: science . Add a commentReblogging the e-Astronomer: NASA has scheduled a media teleconference on the first light of GLAST on:
**Tuesday 26 August @ 2 pm EDT**
You can listen live here. Update: that’s 8 pm in Western Europe (7 pm in the UK).
GLAST is the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope which was launched on 11 June 2008. You can read more about the mission here.
Olympics snippets August 25, 2008
Posted by sarah in: me, random, women . Add a commentI missed a lot of the Olympics while I was on holiday but I really enjoyed what I saw. Special congratulations go to some of the Belgians who did brilliantly, in particular Tia Hellebaut, who won gold on the high jump, and the women’s 4x100m relay team (Olivia Borlée, Hannah Mariën, Elodie Ouedraogo and Kim Gevaert) who got silver. Hellebaut won the first ever female athletics gold for Belgium, yay!
APOD: NGC1275 August 25, 2008
Posted by sarah in: science . Add a commentI’m a bit late to it and it has appeared in a few other places before, but this picture, which appeared on APOD on 22 August, is so stunning I still want to post it up here. It shows a visible light image from the Hubble Space Telescope of this active galaxy. Coolness: if you go to the original APOD post you can overlay radio and X-ray images over this one from Hubble by hovering your cursor over it. Nice touch!
Active Galaxy NGC 1275 Credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA); A. Fabian (IoA, Cambridge U.), L. Frattare (STScI), CXC, G. Taylor, NRAO,VLA
