This beautiful, infrared image shows a new view of the Eagle nebula captured by the European Herschel Space Observatory. In 1995, Hubble famously captured a visble-light image of the “Pillars of Creation,” a region of star-formation. That image is below – in the above image, that region is shown within the circle.
Credit: NASA, Jeff Hester, and Paul Scowen (Arizona State University)
Infrared light is needed to see into the opaque clouds of dust and gas within which stars form. You can read more about what astronomers are learning from this new view of the nebula in the NASA feature.
Check out this gorgeous new zoom! It begins with a wide field view of the southern hemisphere sky, including both the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds and closes in on a star forming region of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Credit: NASA/ESA, ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2, Akira Fujii and Eckhard Slawik. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin
The scene: July 9, 2005, nearly midnight. A large conference room at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center full of assorted scientists, engineers, and support staff. This was the launch party for Astro-E2, a joint Japanese-American satellite mission strapped to a rocket thousands of miles away from Goddard at Uchinoura Space Center in southern Japan. The lucky few were at the launch site, and the rest of us showed up at work on a Saturday night to celebrate.
NASA is famous for its acronyms and technical jargon. If you’ve ever watched a rocket launch or a spacewalk, you’ve heard some of them. Blueshift is produced by the ASD EPO team at NASA GSFC – that is, the Astrophysics Science Division Education and Public Outreach team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Do we need to spell out NASA, too?
In this episode, we explore NASA mission names and where they come from. And we make a very special dedication – this one’s for you, Stephen Colbert!
Links | Maggie Masetti | 
February 13, 2012 4:16 pm | 
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