Fireball over Netherlands October 18, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astronomy, pics . Add a commentIt’s been all quiet on the blogging front while I’ve been burying myself in work and .Astronomy preparations over in the US. But check out this amazing picture of the giant fireball that was seen over the Netherlands and Germany last Tuesday! There were sonic booms and the meteor visible broke up into pieces as it streaked through the atmopshere. I haven’t heard anything yet about any reains being recovered – that would be very cool.
More success for Herschel July 11, 2009
Posted by sarah in: new astronomy, pics, science, space . Add a comment
After the early sneak preview from the PACS instrument on board the recently launched Herschel infrared space telescope, more images have now been released from its other instruments, SPIRE and HIFI. The above image shows images taken with the IR imager and spectrometer SPIRE of nearby galaxy M74 at 250 micron. The amount of detail visible in the images is really great, particularly as all the image reconstruction software hasn’t even been optimised yet. We may be very used to seeing spectacularly detailed images from Hubble, but achieving these resolutions at Herschel’s far-infrared wavelengths is very new. (more…)
