Space Photos of the Week: Mooooooon Shadow, Moon Shadow


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NASA has big plans to return to the moon. The first thing to do is to look at the lunar sites where resources are accessible. Its south pole is one of those privileged sites, where the ice of the water is hidden in shaded craters. This black and white photo, taken by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows the Shackleton crater in the center, one of the many craters in the south that is constantly in the shadows and probably contains a lot of water ice.

Mars goes to technicolor in this elongated image. This stretch of land is the plain between Chryse and Acidalia Planitias, which, like many Mars, has a fairly active past. The darker blues indicate basaltic rocks, formed during the violent volcanic history of the region; oranges are formations created by the wind and, as such, are called wind trails. You can even see how the material was lifted around the crater and pushed south.

In February, comet C2018 Y1 Iwamoto flew over the Earth at 56 million kilometers. The Neowise Space Telescope has captured it in the infrared with four different exposures. This is why it appears on the image as a series of red spots. The hottest stars appear in blue here, while the colder dust and ice of the comet are red.

It's a "preplanetary" nebula called the egg nebula. And it has nothing to do with eggs or planets, despite its name; it was created by a dying star that loses its outer layers. These types of nebulae have existed in this state for only a few thousand years, as they evolved into planetary nebulae. The dark bands and protruding white arms are the material left by a star that was not very different from our Sun. Once the expiring star (concealed in the center by dust and debris) eventually stops spitting out material, its remaining core will heat up. Then, the surrounding gases are excited and illuminated, then turn into a planetary nebula, which has nothing to do with the planets yet. the name comes from its form.

Let's describe this picture. First, this vertical band of starry light is an arm of our Milky Way. These telescopes are called the four-unit telescopes of the very large telescope of the European European Observatory at Cerro Paranal Chile. Note also the bright orange laser pointing to the sky: it serves as a guide star to calibrate the telescope. By pointing the laser upward, researchers can tell how much the atmosphere is turbulent and can better prepare for a night of observation.

Messier 3, as you piss! Astronomers love this globular cluster, and we do not know why: it's one of the most gigantic ever discovered in our universe, with its 500,000 stars. Many of these stars are variable stars, of varying brightness, and many of them are newer and brighter stars, called blue stragglers. They were all trained about the same time, 8 billion years ago.

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