*** The Official Astronomy & Universe Thread ***

Delvis said:
Apologies, telescope I inherited off a family member. It's a Soligor MT-910/4.5: thread on here

Although you can probably get similar if not better buy buying a £200 scope new now :p

So it's taken on my Nexus 5, but through the scope.
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You may need to collimate it if it's a reflector to realign the mirrors - otherwise you get blurring :)
 
After 20 years in space, ESA and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is still going strong. This video takes a look at selected shots from SOHO's 20 years in space:

 
Pluto movie:


This movie is composed of the sharpest views of Pluto that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft obtained during its flyby on July 14, 2015. The pictures are part of a sequence taken near New Horizons’ closest approach to Pluto, with resolutions of about 250-280 feet (77-85 meters) per pixel – revealing features smaller than half a city block on Pluto’s diverse surface.
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Dwarf planet Ceres is shown in these false-colour renderings, which highlight differences in surface materials. Images from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft were used to create a movie of Ceres rotating, followed by a flyover view of Occator Crater, home of Ceres’ brightest area@:

 
Early warning:

December 14th and 15th after midnight: the Geminid Meteor Shower

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The early mornings of December 14th and 15th will give us the chance, if clear, of observing the peak of the Geminid meteor shower. Happily, this is a good a year as the waxing crescent Moon will not hinder our view. An observing location well away from towns or cities will pay dividends though. The relatively slow moving meteors arise from debris released from the asteroid 3200 Phaethon. This is unusual, as most meteor showers come from comets . The radiant - where the meteors appear to come from - is close to the bright star Castor in the constellation Gemini as shown on the chart. If it is clear it will be cold - so wrap up well, wear a woolly hat and have some hot drinks with you.
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Mars Rover Curiosity reaches sand dunes:

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The rippled surface of the first Martian sand dune ever studied up close fills this view of "High Dune" from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Curiosity rover. This site is part of the "Bagnold Dunes" field along the northwestern flank of Mount Sharp. The dunes are active, migrating up to about one yard or meter per year.

The component images of this mosaic view were taken on Nov. 27, 2015, during the 1,176th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars.

The scene is presented with a color adjustment that approximates white balancing, to resemble how the sand would appear under daytime lighting conditions on Earth. The annotated version includes superimposed scale bars of 30 centimeters (1 foot) in the foreground and 100 centimeters (3.3 feet) in the middle distance.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
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More:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4787

More information about Curiosity is online at:

http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/
 
A flood of high-energy gamma from a galaxy known as PKS 1441+25:


The gamma rays came from a galaxy known as PKS 1441+25, a type of active galaxy called a blazar. Located toward the constellation Boötes, the galaxy is so far away its light takes 7.6 billion years to reach us. At its heart lies a monster black hole with a mass estimated at 70 million times the sun's and a surrounding disk of hot gas and dust. If placed at the center of our solar system, the black hole's event horizon -- the point beyond which nothing can escape -- would extend almost to the orbit of Mars.

As material in the disk falls toward the black hole, some of it forms dual particle jets that blast out of the disk in opposite directions at nearly the speed of light. Blazars are so bright in gamma rays because one jet points almost directly toward us, giving astronomers a view straight into the black hole's dynamic and poorly understood realm.

In April, PKS 1441+25 underwent a major eruption. Luigi Pacciani at the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics in Rome was leading a project to catch blazar flares in their earliest stages in collaboration with the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cerenkov experiment (MAGIC), located on La Palma in the Canary Islands. Using public Fermi data, Pacciani discovered the outburst and immediately alerted the astronomical community. Fermi's Large Area Telescope revealed gamma rays up to 33 billion electron volts (GeV), reaching into the highest-energy part of the instrument's detection range. For comparison, visible light has energies between about 2 and 3 electron volts.

Following up on the Fermi alert, the MAGIC team turned to the blazar and detected gamma rays with energies ranging from 40 to 250 GeV. Because this galaxy is so far away, we didn't have a strong expectation of detecting gamma rays with energies this high. That’s because distance matters for very high-energy gamma rays -- they convert into particles when they collide with lower-energy light.

The visible and ultraviolet light from stars shining throughout the history of the universe forms a remnant glow called the extragalactic background light (EBL). For gamma rays, this is a cosmic gauntlet they must pass through to be detected at Earth. When a gamma ray encounters starlight, it transforms into an electron and a positron and is lost to astronomers. The farther away the blazar is, the less likely its highest-energy gamma rays will survive to be detected.

Following the MAGIC discovery, VERITAS also detected gamma rays with energies approaching 200 GeV. PKS 1441+25 is one of only two such distant sources for which gamma rays with energies above 100 GeV have been observed. Its dramatic flare provides a powerful glimpse into the intensity of the EBL from near-infrared to near-ultraviolet wavelengths and suggests that galaxy surveys have identified most of the sources responsible for it.
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Appearances of the Refsdal supernova:


Three appearances of the Refsdal supernova in the galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+2223. Calculations showed that the first image of the supernova appeared in 1998 — an event not observed with a telescope. The second image produced an almost perfect Einstein Cross, which was observed in November 2014 (heic1505). The latest appearance was observed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space telescope on 11 December 2015, as correctly predicted by seven different models.

The positions of all three events are highlighted in this video with animated supernovae, even though the Einstein Cross event is also visible in the original image.
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Milky Way on the Horizon:


This video was taken by the crew of Expedition 44 on board the International Space Station. The sequence of shots was taken on August 12, 2015 from 23:08:04 to 23:31:58 GMT, on a pass over Africa at night. This pass begins while the ISS was over western Spain flying southeast toward Africa. As the video progresses, there are several lightning storms occurring over Africa. The video finishes just southeast of Madagascar.
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Celestial Lightsabers: Stellar Jets in the Herbig-Haro (HH24) object...




This sequence combines a two-dimensional zoom and a three-dimensional flight to explore Hubble’s striking image of the Herbig-Haro object known as HH24. The movie starts with a night sky view of the Orion constellation and zooms in. Located above the left side of Orion’s Belt is the vast dark nebula called the Orion B molecular cloud complex. Within this molecular cloud are many bright regions where stars are forming. This video closes in toward one particularly energetic example.

The movie then switches to an envisioned three-dimensional perspective. As the virtual camera flies into the dark nebula, the stars pass off-screen and the details of the forming stars and their jets of emission are revealed. The central star is hidden by gas and dust, but its prominent twin jets of emission resemble a cosmic, double-bladed lightsaber. These jets have carved an hourglass-shaped cavity in the near side of the nebula. The jet from another stellar newborn in this region has created a cylindrical tunnel through the gas extending to the left. Careful study of the Hubble data reveals a few other jets heating and displacing the gas and dust around them. The nebula provides a vivid example of a gas cloud shaped by stellar emission.

Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Bacon, L. Frattare, Z. Levay, and F. Summers (Viz3D Team, STScI)
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