Mark Megahan
One thing that just about everyone can agree on is that space photos can be both scientifically interesting and stunningly beautiful at the same time. With an ever increasing number of high-tech observation tools coming out constantly, this year’s crop of photos produced some impressive images. The one above is the Veil nebula. It’s what’s left over after a massive star went supernova roughly 10,000 years ago.
Space photos of 2021
Contained in the gallery below are awesome images of stars being born in nursery clouds of dust and gas. Catching their gravitational collapse and spontaneous combustion ignition is a favorite subject for space photographers. Starfields, clusters and nebulae divulge their secrets through ambiguous shapes and immense scale. This year presented images with historic impact like a “new view of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87, complete with measurements of its polarization, revealing the twists and turns of its magnetic field.”
SU Aur is a massive young star, surrounded by a giant planet-forming disc. Astronomers say the shape “almost resembles a bird in flight.”; Venus image by the Parker Solar Probe. The “dark smudge” is the highland region of Aphrodite Terra, while the streaks “are left by particles whizzing through space.”; Palomar 6 starfield is a globular cluster “located near the center of the Milky Way.”; Perseverance touchdown on Mars was captured by a camera mounted on the landing equipment.; The Small Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy orbiting our Milky Way. The Hubble image highlights “a dazzling star cluster called NGC 346 at its center, surrounded by a dark cloud of dust and gas being swept away by outflows of radiation from the energetic new stars.”; The supermassive black hole lurking at the center of galaxy NGC 1097 produces this 5,000 light-years wide dazzling disc. The bright light in the middle is dust and gas visible as spiraling dark clouds falling into the black hole. “The pink/purple ring itself is made up of accelerated star formation, as a result of the intense energy thrown out as the black hole chows down on material.”;
Jupiter the way it would look if you were standing on its moon Juno. The great red spot is an Earth-sized storm that’s been raging for centuries. It also shows the bands of clouds “swirling through the south temperate belt.”; The Cat’s Paw Nebula was the “first light image taken by the CONCERTO instrument, installed this year on the APEX telescope in Chile.”; The SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavor photographed from the International Space Station “as it departs the station to ferry four astronauts back to Earth.”; California Nebula almost took the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year prize. Terry Hancock used “a range of broadband and narrowband filters to apply a new sense of color.”; Galaxy cluster ACO S 295 taken by Hubble showcases galaxies of all shapes and sizes with a stunning sense of scale.”; Galaxy M87 has a massive black hole in it’s core. This Event Horizon Telescope image “reveals the polarization of l the light of the glowing disc around it. The direction of the lines visible in the disc show the orientation of the magnetic field.”;
Cassiopeia A supernova remnant as never seen before, thanks to a composite image made up from Chandra, NuStar and Hubble observatories. “Each color represents a different element – orange is iron, purple is oxygen, green is the silicon/magnesium ratio, and blue is titanium.”; Arp 86 doesn’t sound like much but it contains “a pair of interacting galaxies around 220 million light-years from Earth. The larger galaxy, called NGC 7753, will eventually either consume or eject the smaller galaxy, NGC 7752”; The Lagoon Nebula is a stellar nursery. The combined image “optical data (blue and white) from the Mt. Lemmon Sky Center, as well as X-rad data (pink) from Chandra, highlighting baby stars normally obscured behind the veil.”; CW Leonis is a “carbon star” in the last dying stages of it’s life. The orange-red glow comes as the outer layers are shaken off.; NGC 4254 was photographed from 45 million light-years away using “different wavelengths of light over multiple observations. Gold colors indicate newborn stars, while blue areas are slightly older stars.”; AFGL 5180 is another star nursery and another combined image of visible and infrared light allows stars to be seen which would normally be hidden from sight. This will be a prime target for the newly launched Webb Telescope with it’s special infrared sensitivities.
Galaxies image of the year
Saving the best for last, the Royal Observatory Greenwich gave their Astronomy Photographer of the Year award to Chinese photographer Zhong Wu.
He “won the Galaxies category with an image called The Milky Ring, stitched together from 1,000 shots of the Milky Way taken from China and New Zealand – meaning it was captured from both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.”
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