Micro-observatory Image 4.10

This Micro-observatory image is of Jupiter and it's moons. All I did to process the image was reduce the noise so that you can distinguish the moons better. My recent images of galaxies have been distorted by cloud cover so they are not worthy to post, sadly.

APOD 4.8

This beautiful, barred spiral galaxy is known as M61 or NGC 4303. It's bright spiral arms, immense dust lanes, and short central bar remind us of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. It is located about 55 million light-years away, nearby the Virgo Super Cluster of Galaxies. When it was first discovered by Barnabus Oriani in 1779, it was mistaken for a comet. I selected this image as today's APOD because we are nearing the end of the school year so our astronomy final exam is coming up and one of the topics on the exam is going to be galaxies.

APOD 4.7

A Live View from the International Space Station

This is another different APOD post. The above link will take you to the APOD website where you can get a live view of Earth from the International Space Station (ISS). The cameras that are supplying the incredible view were recently installed and are part of a project where they will be assessing the effects of high energy radiation, which cameras work best, and which camera angles are the most popular.. In total, there are four cameras each pointing in a different direction. With the ISS completing an orbit every 90 minutes, you can see the alternating light and dark side of the Earth every 45 minutes. Although this live feed will be terminated eventually, there may be more projects like this for everyone to take part in.

APOD 4.6

This APOD is an image of NGC 3628 (the Hamburger Galaxy) in the constellation Leo. This galaxy is about 100,000 light years across and has a faint tail that extends from the left part of the galaxy. The tail itself is 300,000 light years in length, extending off of the above image. The tail's presence may be due to gravity and tidal forces from it's neighbors M65 and M66. These three galaxies are known as the Leo Triplet. I chose this APOD because we have recently started doing citizen science and have been classifying galaxies on the site.

APOD 4.5

This APOD is a total lunar eclipse sequence of multiple different images layered over each other. The very scenic view is from Waterton Lakes National Park in Alberta, Canada on the 15th of April. Each of the images of the Moon are separated by 10 minutes of movement. You can clearly see when the Moon is completely in the shadow of the Earth by how red the lunar surface appears. Also in the image, you can see the progression of Mars (above the Moon) and Spica (below the Moon).

Margaret Geller Biography

Margaret Joan Geller is an American astrophysicist born December 8, 1947 in Ithaca, New York. She was encouraged by her mother, Sarah Levine Geller, to study science and mathematics. Geller did not receive any specialized education until she was in college. In 1970, Geller received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. The second university she would attend would be Princeton, where she would spend four years until she received her Ph.D. in Physics. After graduating she moved to Cambridge, England to study at the Institute of Astronomy. In 1980, she moved back to the United States of America to become an assistant professor of Astronomy at Harvard University. It was at this time where she and John P. Huchra, a coworker, began carrying out a red-shift survey for the Center for Astrophysics (CfA). The survey's purpose was to map all galaxies above a certain brightness at a maximum distance of 650 million light years in a particular part of the sky. According to the Big Bang Theory the sky should be homogeneous and uniform in the distribution of galaxies, but that is not what Geller observed. She first observed this in the constellation Bootes in 1981. There was a 100 million light year gap between galaxies in the area. After being an assistant professor for two years, she joined the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory as a permanent scientific staff. In 1988, she became the head professor for Astronomy at Harvard University. Up until the 1990s, she continued her survey of galaxies with Huchra. Their first published observations of a 135 degree slice of the sky showed a thin layer of galaxies that appeared to line the walls of a "bubble-like" empty space. They would later call this the "Great Wall." This wall of galaxies is five times denser than the average density of galaxies spread out across the sky. What blew the minds of Geller and Huchra was the fact that the wall was only 15 million light years thick compared to it's 500 million light years in length. Even though they discovered this phenomena, they were not able to explain it. One theory is that areas in space before the Big Bang were "clumpy," so when the the Big Bang occurred they were distributed unevenly. Another theory is that unusually high amounts of dark matter hold the galaxies in place. Even though they continue to survey the sky, they still do not know how to explain this phenomena.

In 1990, she won the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the Newcomb-Cleveland Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; two of her most important awards. Her most recent and notable award is the 2014 Karl Schwarzchild Medal of the German Astronomical Society. To this day she continues to study galaxies and their evolution and she has taken up an interest in X-ray astronomy.

Micro-observatory Image 4.9

This processed Micro-observatory image is of the Eagle Nebula (Messier 16) located in the constellation Serpens. At the center of the nebula is a young, open cluster of stars. Around the stars are clouds of dust from which the stars are "born" from. In the image you can sort of see the dust clouds and their pillar-like shape. When processing, I did not reduce the noise of any of the RGB pictures so it is minimally adjusted. This attempt at processing an image of the Eagle Nebula was much more successful than my last attempt. The images I received last time were distorted by clouds so they were blurry.