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Here’s a photo of waxing crescent Moon taken tonight at 19:00 GMT from Amsterdam. Only 2 days and 17 hours old, not many features are visible on the surface. The two prominent craters visible at the bottom just at the terminator are Langrenus (right) and Petavius (left).

Photo of waxing crescent Moon taken tonight through a refractor ATC Monar (D=70mm f/4.6) with Canon 450D, exp. 1/50s

The image below portraits two galaxies known as M81 (NGC 3031 or Bode’s Galaxy) and M82 (NGC 3034 or the Cigar Galaxy). M81 is one of the most striking examples of a grand design spiral galaxy, with near perfect arms spiraling into the very center. M82 is five times as bright as the whole Milky Way and one hundred times as bright as our galaxy’s center. Tidal forces caused by gravity have deformed this galaxy, a process that started about 100 million years ago. The interaction between the galaxies has caused star formation in M82 to increase 10 fold compared to “normal” galaxies.

170 minute black and white image of M81 and M82 - Credit: Lightbuckets.com

The inverted image (below) reveals much more that meets the eye. The wispy tendrils seen in the inverted and stretched image are known as Galactic Cirrus. They are high galactic latitude nebulae that are illuminated not by a single star (as most nebula in the plane of the Galaxy are) but by the energy from the integrated flux of all the stars in the Milky Way.  These nebulae clouds, an important component of the Interstellar Medium, are composed of dust particles, hydrogen and carbon monoxide and other elements.

Inverted image of M81 and M82 showing the Galactic Cirrus between the galaxies - Credit: Lightbuckets.com

Galactic Cirrus was first found in plates in the Palomar Sky Survey in the mid 1960’s. Alan Sandage investigated them further in 1975 while working with the Palomar 1.2m Schmidt Telescope. The surface brightness of these structures is about 25 mag. or even fainter, which makes them extremely hard to capture with most amateur equipment.

The galaxy group, consisting of M81, M82, NGC 3077 and NGC 2976, is the nearest galaxy group to our own local group (which contains the Milky Way, Magellanic Clouds, M33, and the M31 – M32 – M110 system). At 12 million light years distance, the nearby proximity of galaxies M81 and M82 makes them one of the most spectacular sights in the spring sky.

- The images used in this post have been taken by Alvin Jeng during a test run of the Lightbuckets’ LB0002 – a 0.2m Newtonian Astrograph.

It was a very cold day in Amsterdam today but along with it came virtually cloudless sky, so I had the chance to continue taking photos of the Moon as it approaches the Full Moon (06:18 GMT on January 30) as well as the perigee (09:04 GMT on January 30, 2010) when the it will be 356,592 km away from the Earth – the closest this year.

Waxing Gibbous Moon taken tonight through a refractor ATC Monar (D=70mm f/4.6) with Canon 450D, exp. 1/50s

(Compare the Moon with photos from January 25 and January 20)

My next target was the open cluster Pleiades (M45). The effects of close proximity with the Moon tonight is visible on the left side of the photo.

Open star cluster Pleiades (M45) through Canon 450D ISO 1600 f/8 exp. 10s

Finally, I turned the camera towards the constellation of Orion and one of the most scrutinized and photographed objects in the night sky – The Orion Nebula (M42).

The Orion Nebula (M42) through Canon 450D ISO 1600 f/8 exp. 10s

Here’s a photo of waxing gibbous Moon taken tonight at 19:20 GMT from Amsterdam.

At the terminator near the top, the edge Sinus Iridum (“Bay of Rainbows”), the plain of basaltic lava that forms a northwestern extension to the Mare Imbrium, is clearly visible. To the south of Mare Imbrium is a prominent lunar impact crater named after the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Just past the terminator on the night side near the south pole is the Cabeus crater where the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) ended its mission impacting the lunar surface on October 9, 2009.

Photo of waxing gibbous Moon taken tonight through a refractor ATC Monar (D=70mm f/4.6) with Canon 450D, exp. 1/50s

The position of the Cabeus crater with respect to Lunar maria (Click to embiggen) - Source: Virtual Moon Atlas

Two spectacular tails of X-ray emission have been seen trailing behind a galaxy known as ESO 130-001 using the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Previously, the Abell 3627 cluster was largely unstudied. Although it is both nearby and bright, its apparent position near the plane of the Milky Way makes it difficult to observe because it is obscured by interstellar dust at optical wavelengths.

A composite image of the galaxy cluster Abell 3627 shows X-rays from Chandra in blue, optical emission in yellow and H-alpha emission in red. The optical and H-alpha data were obtained with the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope in Chile - Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/UVa/M. Sun, et al; H-alpha/Optical: SOAR (UVa/NOAO/UNC/CNPq-Brazil)/M.Sun et al.

ESO 137-001 is plunging into the galaxy cluster causing its cooler gas to be stripped by the cluster’s much hotter gas. The brighter of the two tails has been seen before and extends for about 260,000 light years. The detection of the second, fainter tail, however, was a surprise to the scientists.

The X-ray tails were created when cool gas from ESO 137-001 (with a temperature of about ten degrees above absolute zero) was stripped by hot gas (about 100 million degrees) as it travels towards the center of the galaxy cluster. What astronomers observe with Chandra is essentially the evaporation of the cold gas, which glows at a temperature of about 10 million degrees. Evidence of gas with temperatures between 100 and 1,000 degrees Kelvin in the tail was also found with the Spitzer Space Telescope.

Phenomena like these in ESO 137-001 have a significant effect on how galaxies evolve. The stripping of gas is thought to have a significant effect on galaxy evolution, removing cold gas from the galaxy, shutting down the formation of new stars in the galaxy, and changing the appearance of inner spiral arms and bulges because of the effects of star formation.

The H-alpha data shows evidence for star formation in the tails — the first unambiguous evidence that star formation can occur when cold gas is stripped out of galaxies as they fall through clusters. The Chandra data also reveal an excess of luminous X-ray point sources around the X-ray tails. Some of them are considered to be young massive binary stars associated with nearby young star clusters, giving more evidence of star formation in the tails.

Source: NASA

Below is a selection of the best of images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory collected by nasa1fan/MSFC on Flickr. The observatory, launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999, is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory built to date. It is a part of NASA’s fleet of “Great Observatories” along with the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the now deorbited Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.

Chandra is helping scientists better understand the hot, turbulent regions of space and answer fundamental questions about origin, evolution, and destiny of the Universe. The images Chandra makes are twenty-five times sharper than the best previous X-ray telescope.

This Chandra X-ray Observatory image shows Westerlund 2, a young star cluster with an estimated age of about one or two million years that contains some of the hottest, brightest, and most massive stars known - Credit: NASA/CXC/Univ. de Liège/Y. Naze et al

In this image, low-energy X-rays are colored red, intermediate-energy X-rays in green, and high-energy X-rays in blue. The image shows a very high density of massive stars that are bright in X-rays, plus diffuse X-ray emission. An incredibly massive double star system called WR20a is visible as the bright yellow point just below and to the right of the cluster’s center.