Some Space Photos

NASA's Spitzer Images Out-of-This-World Galaxy "NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has imaged a wild creature of the dark -- a coiled galaxy with an eye-like object at its center. The galaxy, called NGC 1097, is located 50 million light-years away. It is spiral-shaped like our Milky Way, with long, spindly arms of stars. The 'eye' at the center of the galaxy is actually a monstrous black hole surrounded by a ring of stars. In this color-coded infrared view from Spitzer, the area around the invisible black hole is blue and the ring of stars, white."

Here's a newly discovered planetary nebula in the constellation Cygnus. This is the death of a red giant star shedding its outer layers outward. It really has nothing to do with a planet, except this is where heavier elements come from. Well to astronomers heavy means anything bigger than Hydrogen or Helium which together make up 98% of the known mass of the universe. Stars fuse Hydrogen into bigger elements such as Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen up through Iron and when they die these get flung into space to be reused by other bodies (stars, planets, etc.).

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory had it's 10th birthday this week. Pretty good given its expected life was just 5 years. Here's a new version of one of its images of supernova remnant E0102-72.

And some space cameras point at the earth. Here's the Grand Canyon as seen by the European Space Agency's Envisat: