Another excellent Hubble offering, to read more and get larger images go to the source here.

Here’s the short version of the press release:
NGC 2397, pictured in this image from Hubble, is a classic spiral galaxy with long prominent dust lanes along the edges of its arms, seen as dark patches and streaks silhouetted against the starlight. Hubble’s exquisite resolution allows the study of individual stars in nearby galaxies.

Located nearly 60 million light-years away from Earth, the galaxy NGC 2397 is typical of most spirals, with mostly older, yellow and red stars in its central portion, while star formation continues in the outer, bluer spiral arms. The brightest of these young, blue stars can be seen individually in this high resolution view from the Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).

Credit: NASA, ESA & Stephen Smartt (Queen’s University Belfast, UK)

Image (left): Astronaut Peggy Whitson, Expedition 16 commander, exercises on the Cycle Ergometer with Vibration Isolation System (CEVIS) in the Destiny Laboratory. Credit: NASA

Here’s an update from NASA on the upcoming Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle. If you get NASA TV you can see the docking on TV or you can go to NASA TV online.

A quick note on the image above or rather the caption. We don’t really think about vibration but on the ISS, even the simple act of riding a stationary bike will send vibrations reverberating through the ISS – equal and opposite reactions and all that. Can’t say it looks real comfortable either.

Here’s NASA’s story:

The Expedition 16 crew members aboard the International Space Station continued their preparations to receive Europe’s new unpiloted resupply ship, the Jules Verne Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV).

At 2 a.m. EDT, Thursday, the ATV fired it engines, bringing it out of a parking orbit and putting it into position to make its first demonstration approach to the station. During its first approach, which is scheduled for Saturday, the ATV will fire its engines several times to bring it approximately two miles from the station. Once in position, the ATV will conduct thruster firings and other systems tests before it pulls back into a phasing orbit.

The ATV is scheduled to make its final approach and dock to the International Space Station on April 3.

To prepare for the ATV, the crew members completed rendezvous and docking training exercises, simulating the craft’s final approach in case they may be called upon to override the ATV’s automatic docking controls and abort the approach.

In addition to regular station maintenance, crew members conducted hearing tests and completed their daily physical exercise routines to help counteract the effects of long-term exposure to weightlessness in space.

Source: NASA

I had to share this story from Australia via Reuters. I’ve been trying to get a better look at the lump of junk, the images I’ve seen don’t give me a lot of resolution to work with. I did manage to enlarge it without too much distortion and you can see it by clicking the image above.

Is it space junk or just an old air conditioner or the like?

The story from Reuters:

CANBERRA (Reuters) – A cattle farmer in Australia’s remote northern outback on Friday said he had found a giant ball of twisted metal, which he believes is space junk from a rocket used to launch communications satellites.

Farmer James Stirton found the odd-shaped ball last year on his 40,000 hectare property, about 800 kilometers (500 miles) west of the northern Queensland state capital of Brisbane.

But Stirton only started inquiring into what the ball of metal really was, and where it had come from, in the past week.

“I was riding out to check some cattle, and I came around the corner and there it was in a paddock,” Stirton told Reuters on Friday.

“I know a lot of about sheep and cattle but I don’t know much about satellites. But I would say it is a fuel cell off some stage of a rocket.”

He said the object was hollow, and covered in a carbon-fiber material. He has contacted some U.S.-based aerospace companies to try to find out what the object really is.

Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum said it was not uncommon for people to find spacejunk in remote areas of Australia.

In 1979, large parts of the Skylab space station fell to earth near a tiny outback town in Australia’s west. A local council sent NASA a ticket for littering and then the United States President Jimmy Carter rang a local motel to apologize.

(Reporting by James Grubel; Editing by David Fox)

© Reuters 2008. All Rights Reserved.

This is M82?! Yes it is, one of the galaxies I was paying a lot of attention to this past fall. This image shows so much more, Sptizer, Chandra, and Hubble all contributed to show us detail we’d not see otherwise.

I know some out there don’t care for the X-ray vision of Chandra, the infrared vision of Spitzer, but all love Hubble. When you look at this image the diagonal bright streak extending from about 8pm to 2pm is essentially the optical part of the galaxy, what we’d see (although not in as much detail) through a telescope (yeah go look if you can directions here). Now if you look at the reds and the ghostly blues, those are what Spitzer and Chandra sees and represent different wavelengths of light from very energetic particles, probably excited from gas being blown out of the galaxy by stellar explosions.

Knowing that there is meaning to those “different” colors helps me appreciate the image as a whole more, and hopefully those who don’t care for them will begin to see them in a whole new light (pardon the pun ha!). If not, well that’s ok too.

The stellar explosions are pretty transient, the visible light lasting at most a few seconds, but the light in the frequencies that Spitzer and Chandra can see do persist, and sometimes are the only sign something happened or for that matter anything including galaxies are even there.  Astronomers are using these emissions are a like sign posts and are enabling them to find galaxies that are too distant to be seen.

There is an excellent (and relatively short) article by Spitzer Science Centers Linda Vu on the Spitzer website that explains it all rather well – check it out here.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/CXC/UofA/ESA/AURA/JHU

The Cassini team releases some good information on the fly-by of Enceladus and the fly-through of the plumes of the moons south pole. The press release (below refers to the annotated image above, if you click it you will get a larger non-annotated version). Keep in mind the colors are enhanced and Hotspots is a relative term.

The Cassini press release:

Heat radiating from the entire length of 150 kilometer (95 mile)-long fractures is seen in this best-yet heat map of the active south polar region of Saturn’s ice moon Enceladus. The warmest parts of the fractures tend to lie on locations of the plume jets identified in earlier images, shown in the annotated version with yellow stars. The measurements were obtained by the Cassini spacecraft’s Composite Infrared Spectrometer from the spacecraft’s close flyby of the moon on March 12, 2008.

Remarkably high temperatures, at least 180 Kelvin (minus 135 degrees Fahrenheit) were registered along the brightest fracture, named Damascus Sulcus, in the lower left portion of the image. For comparison, surface temperatures elsewhere in the south polar region of Enceladus are below 72 Kelvin (minus 330 degrees Fahrenheit).
Read more »

STS-123 Landing

Current Status (1st opportunity): They are home!!! Sadly I just missed it, class ran a little later than I expected

Deorbit Burn: 5:58 pm E.D.T.

Landing Time: Wednesday, 7:05 pm E.D.T8:30 EDT

Primary Landing Site: KSC

Second Attempt if necessary: Above times + 90 minutes

Landing image — F5 to refresh. Webcam Image courtesy: NASA/Kennedy Space Center

NOAA’s Forecast:

Mostly sunny, with a high near 73. East northeast wind between 5 and 15 mph.

Wednesday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around 56. East wind between 5 and 10 mph.

To keep current with the news about the landing, I recommend you check out NASA’s Launch Blog. To watch the landing go to NASA-TV.

Click here to see a ground track.

Image Credits: NASA / NOAA