Photos from Space

Not much in the way of news today, so here are some photos to tickle your fancy.

Enjoy!

--->Susan


Artist's concept shows a cloudy Jupiter-like planet that orbits very close to its fiery hot star.


X-rays from Chandra are shown in blue and are overlaid on an optical image from the Hubble Space Telescope. The Chandra observations show that this object is a so-called ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX). An unusual class of objects, ULXs emit more X-rays than stars, but less than quasars. Their exact nature has remained a mystery, but one suggestion is that some ULXs are black holes with masses between about a hundred and a thousands times that of the Sun.


This image of a cluster of rocks labeled 'Rock Garden' is where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit became embedded in April 2009. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers landed on the Red Planet in January 2004 for what was to be a 90-day mission, but which has lasted 6 Earth years, or 3.2 Mars years. During this time, Spirit has found evidence of a steamy and violent environment on ancient Mars that is quite different from the wet and acidic past documented by Opportunity, which has been operating successfully as it explores halfway around the planet.


This natural-color image of Mayon Volcano was captured on Dec. 15, 2009, by the Advanced Land Imager on NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite. A small plume of ash and steam is blowing west from the summit. Dark-colored lava or debris flows from previous eruptions streak the flanks of the mountain. A ravine on the southeast slope is occupied by a particularly prominent lava or debris flow.


The Cat's Eye Nebula taken by Hubble. The nebula is in the constellation of Draco approximately 3,000 light years from Earth.


Death of a comet. NASA's SOHO observatory took these series of shots of a comet getting just a bit too up close and personal with the sun. Comet goes in, but it doesn't come out. Oops. One less dirty snowball in the solar system to worry about.