first image from VISTA

[pokerfan]

This image is of the Flame Nebula, a star forming gas cloud in Orion. The bright star in the image is the monster blue supergiant Alnitak, which is the easternmost (left, to northern observers) star in Orion’s belt.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/12/11/incredible-vista-of-the-cosmos">

Click on the picture to find a link to the big image courtesy of Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer.

[n2doc]

1. pretty! n/t

[sazemisery]

2. That is teh awesome! Thanks for the link.

:hi:

[WillParkinson]

3. Is it just me....

Or can you find other shapes in here?

The top right side - the blue glowing part - looks like the eye of a lion. If you move down just a tad you can see the nose and mouth. The cloud behind it looks like a cosmic mane.

Or perhaps I'm just overly tired.

(On edit: Go with the tired. I just completely mangled "perhaps".)

[laughingliberal]

4. I see man with a beard nt

[pokerfan]

8. I see a horse's head.... :)

But yeah, one can find all kinds of things in the chaos of clouds. This looks like a human hand to me.



Probably looking to snatch a starship...

[lapfog_1]

5. "To prevent war, the galaxy is on Orion's belt." (collar!) - n/t

[GreenPartyVoter]

6. I love, love, love pictures of nebulae! Thanks for sharing this one. :^)

[silverweb]

7. Beautiful!

[inna]

9. WOW!

:wow:

[tridim]

10. Is Vista the scope with the laser/atmosphere correction feature?

I'm losing track of all the new machines.

[pokerfan]

11. VISTA is the new European infrared scope

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VISTA_%28telescope%29

Active/adaptive optics aren't not that uncommon anymore. I first saw one at the MMT ten years ago.

[tridim]

12. Yea I was just reading about it..

Seems they're now retrofitting older scopes with the new adaptive optics. The solution is genius IMO.

[pokerfan]

13. Yeah, it's ingenious

In theory, it seems an obvious notion, not terribly unlike many things that are done in electronics (my field) such as communications (my specialty). But when I had it explained to me, I was more astonished at the mechanical engineering involved than the electronics.

Still, all things being equal, nothing beats an equivalently sized space telescope. But then again, things aren't equal, what with launch constraints and costs. So it's a terrific way for terrestrial scopes to rival and surpass their space-bound versions.

[Fumesucker]

18. Even amateurs are using a form of adaptive optics for planetary imaging these days..

http://www.stellarproducts.com/

Stellar Products was the first company to manufacture standard adaptive optics systems to both amateur and professional astronomers. The AO-2 adaptive optics system provided image stabilization for planetary photography. The AO-5 adaptive optics system will provide correction of defocus and astigmatism as well as image stabilization. Either of these systems allows the astronomer to improve his images to the limit of his telescope.

I first read of adaptive optics for astronomy in the late sixties in a Scientific American book of projects, it was a system which used beam splitter prisms controlled by photomultiplier tubes through an amplifier to stabilize an image on photographic film.

[Canuckistanian]

14. Wow

I've been looking at Alnitak my whole life. I had no idea it looked like that close up.

Astounding.

[pokerfan]

15. It's not even that high a magnification

The image area is actually about equal to that of two full moons. It's just faint. That and the fact that we are seeing it in the infrared. The same nebula through a much more modest scope:

[Canuckistanian]

16. Ah, Infra-Red

So this is a view I could never see through a normal telescope.

It's still amazing.

[Posteritatis]

17. I think IR filters are relatively cheap these days

Well, "cheap" by the standards of telescopes, that is. So you might not be able to get that view with that ridiculous level of detail, but you could meander in that direction.

[Fumesucker]

19. Actually, keeping infrared *out* of digital cameras is the problem

For most "normal" photography.

Infrared will bias your images to a very strong red hue if it gets into your detector, even very cheap webcams have an infrared blocking filter to keep the color balance more accurate.

[Posteritatis]

20. I meant for the telescopes themselves, but yeah

I've played around a (very) little with IR photography and kinda want to do so more. I mainly meant that if someone wants to view IR through a telescope it's a bit of a pain but, from what I've seen, far from impossible. Not to VISTA's extent obviously, but still.

[eppur_se_muova]

21. More pix from BBC ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8408807.stm