Astronomy – Page 2 – Journeys of Heart and Mind

Image of the day – 12

This has been nicknamed ‘The Penguin and Egg’ by some astronomers, I think it looks rather more like a hummingbird.

What’s in an image? Sometimes quite a lot, more than meets the eye.

I’m posting an image every day (or as often as I can). A photo, an image from the internet, a diagram or a map. Whatever takes my fancy.

We have something a little different today. This has been nicknamed ‘The Penguin and Egg’ by some astronomers, I think it looks rather more like a hummingbird. But its real name is not so memorable, the penguin is NGC2936 and the egg is NGC2937. They are a pair of colliding galaxies and will eventually merge. This view comes courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope; the website is worth a visit, there are many more images like this one.

The universe we inhabit is huge. Those two galaxies are interacting, but it takes light 100 000 years to travel between them. Click the image and look closely and you’ll see dozens more galaxies in the far distance beyond this pair. We are surrounded by awesomeness!

Themed image collections

The links below will take you to the first post in each collection

Cirencester, Favourites, Irish holiday 2024, Roman villa

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The Dark Side of the Moon

Here’s a nice NASA video illustrating the dark … side of the Moon.

What do people mean when they talk about ‘the dark side of the Moon’? Is there a dark side of the Moon at all? How did this strange phrase originate?

This popular phrase is usually misunderstood. Astronomers often object strongly, ‘The far side of the Moon gets the same amount of sunlight as the visible near side’. They are both correct and incorrect. In terms of solar illumination they’re correct, of course.

But good astronomers are not necessarily good linguists. The word ‘dark’ in this phrase does not mean absence of light, it means hidden from view or obscured. Dark meant ‘hidden’ or ‘secret’ long before it came to be used to mean an absence of light. See the Wiktionary definition.

Here’s a nice NASA video illustrating the dark (hidden) side of the Moon. You’ll notice it has night and day periods of course, just like the near side.

The Moon – and what else?

Let’s zoom in a little, that always helps…

The crescent Moon shines out in the evening of 23rd February, but there are three solar system objects in this image. After the Sun, the Moon is the second brightest object in Earth’s night sky.

The third and fourth brightest objects in our sky are present in this image. Can you see them? I doubt it, they are lost in the remaining glow of the sun as it sets. But if you know exactly where to look, you might see them.

Let’s zoom in a little, that always helps…

So, did you see them? No? They are there in plain view, but congratulations if you spotted them, it’s still not easy.

The third brightest object in our night sky is Venus, and you can see it near the bottom right corner of the photo – a little white dot. The fourth brightest object is Jupiter. It’s there to see as well, between the Moon and Venus, but a bit closer to Venus than to the Moon. See it now? (If you’re reading this on your phone you will need to enlarge the image.)

Later in the evening they are impossible to miss. The Moon is moving further away from this scene day by day, but Venus and Jupiter are getting closer to one another in the sky and are both very bright in a darker sky. Jupiter is also getting closer to the horizon and setting earlier and earlier as the days pass so if you want to see it, look in the next day or two. In April Jupiter will reappear in the morning sky before sunrise.

Category: Astronomy