Thursday, May 11, 2017

When NASA Goes for Trippin' with the Crab Nebula - Science / Photography

The key to the various types of Terran and orbiting telescopes is they capture light or other type of radiation.  Combining those images in their differing wavelengths results in some of the most breathtaking compositing of the Crab Nebula ever seen.

Here's the NASA video of making up the composite.



This video starts with a composite image of the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant that was assembled by combining data from five telescopes spanning nearly the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum: the Very Large Array, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, the XMM-Newton Observatory, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The video dissolves to the red-colored radio-light view that shows how a neutron star’s fierce “wind” of charged particles from the central neutron star energized the nebula, causing it to emit the radio waves. The yellow-colored infrared image includes the glow of dust particles absorbing ultraviolet and visible light. The green-colored Hubble visible-light image offers a very sharp view of hot filamentary structures that permeate this nebula. The blue-colored ultraviolet image and the purple-colored X-ray image shows the effect of an energetic cloud of electrons driven by a rapidly rotating neutron star at the center of the nebula. 

Video Credit: NASA, ESA, J. DePasquale (STScI)

- YouTube

Glory in such a monumental big bang and the Chinese saw it happen.  The supernova took place in 1054 A.D. and it was definitely witnessed.


Here's the final composite.  (NASA:  New View of the Crab Nebula)



Feature: Observatories Combine to Crack Open the Crab Nebula

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, NRAO/AUI/NSF and G. Dubner (University of Buenos Aires)


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