August 23, 2010 - Distant Spiral Splendor
Distant Spiral Splendor A glance at the night sky rewards you with a view of enormous suns so incredibly distant they appear as mere points of light. If you know where to look, you can spy a few galaxies with your naked eye, some far enough away that their light took two million years to reach your eyes. With the proper equipment you can view even more distant objects, like NGC 891, an edge-on spiral galaxy in Andromeda some 30 million light-years away. This dramatic image of NGC 891 was taken by California amateur astronomer Jay GaBany using a 20-inch remotely-operated telescope located in New Mexico. He used an 11-megapixel astronomical CCD imager to collect over twenty hours of starlight on multiple evenings between November 2006 and April 2007.
Image credit:R. Jay GaBany / www.cosmotography.com
Weekly Calendar
August 23-29, 2010
Holidays - Sky Events - Space History
Monday 23
Venus 2° south of Mars
Tuesday 24
Full Moon 1:05 PM ET
Neptune 5° south of Moon
Wednesday 25
Moon at apogee
1965: President Johnson approves full-scale development of Manned Orbital Laboratory
1966: Apollo-Saturn 202 launched
1981: Voyager 2 flies past Saturn
1989: Voyager 2 flies past Neptune
2003: Spitzer Space Telescope launched
Thursday 26
Friday 27
Uranus 6° south of Moon
Jupiter 7° south of Moon
1962: Mariner 2 launched
1984: Teacher In Space program announced
1985: STS-51I Discovery launched
Saturday 28
1789: William Herschel discovers Enceladus, moon of Saturn
1993: Galileo spacecraft flies by asteroid Ida
2009: STS-128 Discovery launched