Original Art & Photography from GOD - slow loading many pics

ACHONDRITES


Achondrite meteorites are stone metoerites which do not show any chondrules. They may, however, have round clasts or other spherical crystals that have grown out of re-melted, metamorphosed material. This can cause confusion. One clue is that achondrites very rarely contain any visible metal.

CHONDRITES

The group of stone meteorites known as chondrites is broken down into three classifications: ordinary chondrites, including amphoterites (LLs), enstatite chondrites (E chondrites), and carbonaceous chondrites, (C chondrites).
"Ordinary" chondrites are classified from LL for "low" iron content, through H for "high" iron content. They are further classified by a numbering system of 3 through 6: where the lower the number the less the chondrules have changed and the higher the number, the more the condrules have been changed. This alteration may have been caused by heat, pressure or shock prior to landing on Earth. An L3 for instance would refer to a low iron, virtually untouched ordinary condrite with perfect chondrules.

Carbonaceous chondrites are those that are rich in the element carbon. These meteorites have stirred a great deal of scientific interest since the discovery that they contain amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, as well as diamonds and other complex and interesting compounds.

Is this one galaxy or two? This question came to light in 1950 when astronomer Art Hoag chanced upon this unusual extragalactic object. On the outside is a ring dominated by bright blue stars, while near the center lies a ball of much redder stars that are likely much older. Between the two is a gap that appears almost completely dark. How Hoag's Object formed remains unknown, although similar objects have now been identified and collectively labeled as a form of ring galaxy. Genesis hypotheses include a galaxy collision billions of years ago and perturbative gravitational interactions involving an unusually shaped core. The above photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in July 2001 reveals unprecedented details of Hoag's Object and may yield a better understanding. Hoag's Object spans about 100,000 light years and lies about 600 million light years away toward the constellation of Serpens. Coincidentally, visible in the gap (at about one o'clock) is yet another ring galaxy that likely lies far in the distance.

Col

Ring Nebula on page 4 looks like the eye of God, could it have 2 names?

hey hi paulaj and welcome back...
i wondered where youd gone...did you have a good time on vacation??
and yes its true !
i just searched 'eye of god space' on google and i found it! and its the same thing
when i searched for 'eye of god' b4, when we last spoke, a month ago, i couldnt find it, but now i have! thanks to the addition of the word 'space' in the search...
i never knew it was called that..its official name is the helix nebula

heres a couple of links anyway as proof
http://www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/e/eyeofgod.htm
http://www.snopes.com/photos/space/eyeofgod.asp

Hi Col

I just blew into town on 8/19, I had a wonderful time but it feels good to be home. Thanks for the links, I found this guy's work on one of them, boy is he talented. I'm still enjoying your pics.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/arts/sidewalk.asp

ok im glad to hear it paula..that your happy 2b home, that you had a good time and that you are enjoying my pics more to come in the future

thx 4 the link too... hmm theres some talented people in this world

peace and love dear...
see you around

Seemingly adrift in a cosmic sea of stars and gas, this delicate, floating apparition is cataloged as NGC 7635 -- The Bubble Nebula. In this wide-angle view, the Bubble nebula lies at the center of a larger complex of shocked glowing gas about 11,000 light-years distant in the fair constellation Cassiopeia. NGC 7635 really is an interstellar bubble, blown by winds from the brightest star visible within the bubble's boundary. The bubble's expansion is constrained by the surrounding material. About 10 light-years in diameter, if the Bubble nebula were centered on the Sun, the Sun's nearest stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri, would also be enclosed. This breathtaking picture is a combination of telescopic digital images made through broad color filters along with a narrow filter intended to transmit only the red light emitted by excited hydrogen atoms.

Astronomer Ken Crawford's striking view combines a long exposure through a hydrogen alpha filter with color images to reveal the intricate details of this cosmic bubble and its environment. Although it looks delicate, the 10 light-year diameter bubble offers evidence of violent processes at work. Seen here above and left of the Bubble's center is a bright hot star embedded in telltale blue hues characteristic of dust reflected starlight. A fierce stellar wind and intense radiation from the star, which likely has a mass 10 to 20 times that of the Sun, has blasted out the structure of glowing gas against denser material in a surrounding molecular cloud. The intriguing Bubble Nebula lies a mere 11,000 light-years away toward the boastful constellation Cassiopeia.

NGC 6888, also known as the Crescent Nebula, is a cosmic bubble of interstellar gas about 25 light-years across. Created by winds from the bright, massive star seen near the center of this composite image, the shocked filaments of gas glowing at optical wavelengths are represented in green and yellowish hues. X-ray image data from a portion of the nebula viewed by the Chandra Observatory is overlaid in blue. Such isolated stellar wind bubbles are not usually seen to produce energetic x-rays, which require heating gas to a million degrees celsius. Still, NGC 6888 seems to have accomplished this as slow moving winds from the central star's initial transition to a red supergiant were overtaken and rammed by faster winds driven by the intense radiation from the star's exposed inner layers. Burning fuel at a prodigious rate and near the end of its stellar life, NGC 6888's central star should ultimately go out with a bang, creating a supernova explosion in 100,000 years or so. NGC 6888 is about 5,000 light-years close, toward the constellation Cygnus.

Blossoming in nearby galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), this gorgeous nebula is energized by radiation and winds from a massive star whose surface temperature approaches 100,000 degrees. The composite color image from the European Southern Observatory's Melipal telescope resolves details in the energetic nebula, with emission from helium atoms in blue hues, oxygen atoms in green, and hydrogen atoms in red. While emission nebulae generally show the familiar red light from ionized hydrogen atoms - hydrogen atoms with their electrons stripped away - ionized helium atoms are tracers of even higher energy interactions. The intriguing filaments of helium emission make this and other recently studied emission nebulae most exceptional. A Wolf-Rayet star, the massive star powering this nebula, created a cosmic bubble with stellar winds in the early stages of its life. Part of the bubble is still apparent as the large arc in the lower portion of the image. The area pictured is about 150 light-years across

Tuning in to the center of our Milky Way galaxy, radio astronomers explore a complex, mysterious place. A premier high resolution view, this startlingly beautiful picture covers a 4x4 degree region around the galactic center. It was constructed from 1 meter wavelength radio data obtained by telescopes of the Very Large Array near Socorro, New Mexico, USA. The galactic center itself is at the edge of the extremely bright object labeled Sagittarius (Sgr) A, suspected of harboring a million solar mass black hole. Along the galactic plane which runs diagonally through the image are tortured clouds of gas energized by hot stars and bubble-shaped supernova remnants (SNRs) - hallmarks of a violent and energetic cosmic environment. But perhaps most intriguing are the arcs, threads, and filaments which abound in the scene. Their uncertain origins challenge present theories of the dynamics of the galactic center.

Few astronomical sights excite the imagination like the nearby stellar nursery known as the Orion Nebula. The Nebula's glowing gas surrounds hot young stars at the edge of an immense interstellar molecular cloud only 1500 light-years away. The Great Nebula in Orion can be found with the unaided eye just below and to the left of the easily identifiable belt of three stars in the popular constellation Orion. The above image has been contrast balanced to bring out Orion's detail in spectacular fashion. Visible simultaneously are the bright stars of the Trapezium in Orion's heart, the sweeping lanes of dark dust that cross the center, the pervasive red glowing hydrogen gas, and the blue tinted dust that reflects the light of newborn stars. The whole Orion Nebula cloud complex, which includes the Horsehead Nebula, will slowly disperse over the next 100,000 years.

The Coma Cluster of Galaxies

Almost every object in the above photograph is a galaxy. The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured above is one of the densest clusters known - it contains thousands of galaxies. Each of these galaxies houses billions of stars - just as our own Milky Way Galaxy does. Although nearby when compared to most other clusters, light from the Coma Cluster still takes hundreds of millions of years to reach us. In fact, the Coma Cluster is so big it takes light millions of years just to go from one side to the other! Most galaxies in Coma and other clusters are ellipticals, while most galaxies outside of clusters are spirals. The nature of Coma's X-ray emission is still being investigated.

The Spiral Arms of NGC 4622

While stirring a morning cup of coffee and thinking cosmic thoughts many astronomers would glance at this Hubble Space Telescope image of spiral galaxy NGC 4622 and assume that the galaxy was rotating counterclockwise in the picture. One hundred million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, NGC 4622's gorgeous outer spiral arms, traced by bright bluish star clusters and dark dust lanes, should be winding up like ... well, like swirls in a cup of coffee. But a closer look at this galaxy reveals that a pronounced inner spiral arm winds in the opposite direction. So which way is this galaxy rotating? Recent evidence combining ground-based spectroscopy and the sharp Hubble image data surprisingly indicates that the galaxy is likely rotating clockwise in the picture, its outer spiral arms opening outward in the direction of rotation. There are further indications that a past collision with a smaller companion galaxy has contributed to this bizarre rotational arrangement of spiral arms, essentially unique among known large spiral galaxies, in NGC 4622.

Local Group Galaxy NGC 6822

Nearby galaxy NGC 6822 is irregular in several ways. First, the galaxy's star distribution merits a formal classification of dwarf irregular, and from our vantage-point the small galaxy appears nearly rectangular. What strikes astronomers as more peculiar, however, is NGC 6822's unusually high abundance of HII regions, locales of ionized hydrogen that surround young stars. Large HII regions, also known as emission nebulas, are visible surrounding the small galaxy, particularly toward the upper right. Toward the lower left are bright stars that are loosely grouped into an arm. Pictured above, NGC 6822, also known as Barnard's Galaxy, is located only about 1.5 million light years away and so is a member of our Local Group of Galaxies. The galaxy, home to famous nebulas including Hubble V, is visible with a small telescope toward the constellation of Sagittarius.

X-Ray of Milky Ways Galactic Centre


If you had x-ray vision, the center regions of our Galaxy would not be hidden from view by immense cosmic dust clouds opaque to visible light. Instead, the Milky Way toward Sagittarius might look something like this stunning mosaic of images from the orbiting Chandra Observatory. Pleasing to look at, the gorgeous false-color representation of the x-ray data shows high energy x-rays in blue, medium energies in green, and low energies in red. Hundreds of white dwarf stars, neutron stars, and black holes immersed in a fog of multimillion-degree gas are included in the x-ray vista. Within the white patch at the image center lies the Galaxy's central supermassive black hole. Chandra's sharp x-ray vision will likely lead to a new appreciation of our Milky Way's most active neighborhood and has already indicated that the hot gas itself may have a temperature of a mere 10 million degrees Celsius instead of 100 million degrees as previously thought. The full mosaic is composed of 30 separate images and covers a 900 by 400 light-year swath at the galactic center.

Cassiopeia A in a Million

One million seconds of x-ray image data were used to construct this view of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, the expanding debris cloud from a stellar explosion. The stunningly detailed image from the Chandra Observatory will allow an unprecedented exploration of the catastrophic fate that awaits stars much more massive than the Sun. Seen in false-color, Cas A's outer green ring, 10 light-years or so in diameter, marks the location of the expanding shock from the original supernova explosion. At about 10 o'clock around the ring, a structure extends beyond it, evidence that the initial explosion may have also produced energetic jets. Still glowing in x-rays, the tiny point source near the center of Cas A is a neutron star, the collapsed remains of the stellar core. While Cas A is about 10,000 light-years away, light from the supernova explosion first reached Earth just over 300 years ago.

Ringed Nebulae

this gorgeous celestial vista centered on the Milky Way's own planetary nebula M57, the famous Ring Nebula. The wide view is a composite of three exposures; one to record the details of the inner roughly one light-year span of the familiar nebula, one to record the surprisingly intricate but faint outer rings of glowing hydrogen gas, and one to pick up the rich assortment of distant background galaxies. By chance, one of the background galaxies, IC 1296 at the upper left, is close enough to show its barred, spiral structure making an attractive visual comparison with M57. Interestingly, though IC 1296 is 200 million light-years away compared to only 2 thousand light-years for M57, a faint ring is also apparent around the outer reaches of the distant spiral galaxy.

Hey col, you inadvertently helped me out.

I've been wanting to teach myself how to paint but haven't been motivated enough until I saw all of these pics, this morning I woke up and just started painting stars and now I'm making my own llittle whirlpool galaxy. I'm having a ball and it's not that difficult. One of my favorite pics is on page 3 "whirlpool galaxy" so I'm using that as a tutor.

Thanks for the jump start.