Space Exploration

Yes, I admit it.
I’ve been watching the Discovery channel way too much…
‘The Universe’ is an awesome program about different aspects of space every week.
I just can’t get enough of it!
If you’re at all interested in space, then I highly recommend tuning in.

After hours of sitting on the couch eating cereal watching this series, it’s thoroughly inspired me to take more of an interest in space exploration. So firstly, I downloaded the star map version of Google Earth, called Google Sky. The amount of detail on this program is phenomenal! As I zoomed from galaxies to binary stars, and red giants using the search bar, the tremendous amount of information I was avidly watching was amazing.
After a few hours of being glued to my PC, I decided that since the Hubble Telescope was the machine that managed to capture most of this data, that I would look up some information on the HubbleCast page.
The pictures that I found on this site were so awe-inspiring that I have to share a few here:

This is the Eagle Nebula.

According to the Hubble site, this Nebula is a massive 9.5 light years, or in more usable terms, 90 trillion kilometres high! The colours you can see in this picture are from gases. The blue at the top of the photo is glowing oxygen, and the red at the bottom is glowing hydrogen.

This is from a nearby galaxy, supernova remnants that encouraged star birth.

This galaxy is reported to have had star birth 25 million years ago. Apparently, it subsided around a similar time to the first humans on Earth.

Lastly, this is my favourite:

This star cluster is called Pimsis 24, and it is 8,000 light years from Earth.

This star cluster is situated right in the middle of a nebula near the Scorpius Constellation. It was once thought to have the heaviest mass of a star in the Milky Way, but since then, astronomers have discovered that is actually two stars, thus halving the mass.

The last thing that intrigued me about Google Sky, was when I found a ‘globular’ star cluster called Omega Centauri on the map. There was a small video reporting recent findings in this area, so I took a look.
It seems that this globular cluster of stars ‘orbiting’ the Milky Way could well be a ‘dwarf’ galaxy. There had previously been issues with the mass of the centre of this cluster, apparently astronomers now think it could well be a black hole! Since they have only found two certifiable black holes, I found that very interesting!

Anyway, back to gazing the night skies with my husband’s hi-tech telescope!