#photpgraphy

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devin by hardciderny

[jawne-paranoje]

[crows-before-bros]

Shot of Tomato the Crow. Shots like this is why I'm considering purchasing TopazAI to enhance them.

[lafontainedenbiri]

[thepastisalreadywritten]

The Year’s Most Spectacular Photos from the James Webb Telescope

By Jeffrey Kluger

December 22, 2023

Close to 1,500 light years from Earth lie a pair of baby stellar twins known as Herbig-Haro 46/47 — which are barely a few thousand years old.

A star the size of our sun, by contrast, takes an average of 50 million years to reach even the stellar equivalent of young adulthood It's Herbig-Haro 46/47's extreme youth that gives the formation more of a blob-like appearance than the stellar duo it is.

Young stars are buried in clouds of dust and gas, which they absorb as they grow. Sometimes, however the infant stars ingest too much material too fast.

When that happens, dust and gas erupts from both sides of the formation, giving the young pair their misshapen look.

But if you have patience — 50 million years worth of patience — what is a blob today will be stars tomorrow.

NASA, ESA, CSA. Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

A pair of brilliant stellar nurseries located 1,600 light years from Earth, the Orion Nebula and Trapezium Cluster are home to a relative handful of very young but very bright stars.

Four of the stars are easy to see with a simple, amateur, four-inch telescope.

One of the four — the beast of the young litter — is especially visible, a full 20,000 times brighter than our sun.

Apart from their four main stars, the Orion Nebula and Trapezium cluster contain approximately 700 additional young stars at various stages of gestation.

NASA, ESA, CSA/Science leads and image processing: M. McCaughrean, S. Pearson, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

(L): It’s not easy being a Wolf-Rayet star, like this specimen imaged by the Webb telescope at a distance of 15,000 light years.

A rare species of stellar beast — NASA estimates there are only 220 of them in a Milky Way galaxy with at least 100 billion stars — the Wolf-Rayet burns hot and burns fast, with temperatures 20 to 40 times the surface of the sun.

All of that rapidly expended energy causes the star to lose its hydrogen envelope quickly and expose its helium core.

The result: a very early and very violent death.

A star like our sun burns for about 10 billion years. As for a Wolf-Rayet? Just a few hundred thousand before it dissolves into cosmic dust.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team

(R): If the Wolf-Rayet star dies an ugly and violent death, the celebrated Ring Nebula, photographed by the Webb at a distance of 2,000 light years from Earth, has been expiring beautifully.

The glowing remains of a sun-like star, the nebula was discovered in 1779 by the French astronomer Antoine Darquier de Pellepoix.

As the nebula throws off its outer layers of ionized gas, it reveals its characteristic blue interior, composed of hydrogen and oxygen that have not yet been expelled off by the nebula’s stellar wind.

ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Barlow (University College London), N. Cox (ACRI-ST), R. Wesson (Cardiff University)

Dwarf galaxy NGC 6822 lives up to to its name — home to just 10 million stars, compared to the minimum of 100 billion in the Milky Way.

But what NGC 6822 lacks in numbers, it makes up in spectacle — which the keen eye of the Webb telescope has revealed.

Discovered in 1884 by American astronomer E.E Barnard, NGC 6822, is now known to have a prodigious dust tail measuring 200 light years across..

What's more, it's home to a dense flock of stars that glow 100,000 times brighter than our sun.

ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, M. Meixnev

Spiral galaxies are often defined by uneven — and even ragged — arms.

But not galaxy M51, which lies 27 million light years from Earth and is defined by the tautness of its arms and the compactness of its structure.

M51 isn't alone in space. Nearby lies the companion galaxy NGC 5195.

The two galaxies are engaged in something of a gravitational tug of war — one that the NGC 5195 is winning.

NGC's constant gravitational pull is thought to account for both the tightly woven structure of M51's arms and for tidal forces that are thought lead to the creation of new stars in the arms.

ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the FEAST JWST team

Just below Orion’s belt lies one of the most celebrated objects in the night sky: the Orion Nebula, a stellar nursery that is home to about 700 young stars.

This Webb image focuses not on the entirety of the nebula but on a structure in the lower left-hand quadrant known as the Orion Bar.

So named because of its diagonal, ridge-like appearance, the bar is shaped by the powerful radiation of the hot, young stars surrounding it.

ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb), and the PDRs4All ERS Team

A baby by stellar standards, the IC 348 Star cluster is just five million years old and located about 1,000 light years from Earth.

Composed of an estimated 700 stars, IC 348 has a structure similar to wispy curtains, created by dust that reflects the light of the stars.

The conspicuous loop in the right hand side of the image is likely created by the gusting of solar winds blowing in the direction that, from Earth, would be west to east.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Kevin Luhman (PSU), Catarina Alves de Oliveira (ESA)

When it comes to galaxies, there's big and then there's huge and by any measure, Pandora's Cluster — more formally, known as Abell 2744 — qualifies as the latter.

Not just a galaxy, and not even a cluster of galaxies, Abell 2744 is a cluster of four clusters, which long ago collided with one another.

Located 3.5 billion light years from Earth, Pandora's Cluster measures a staggering 350 million years across.

The cluster's massive collective gravity allows astronomers to use it as a gravitational lens, bending and magnifying the light of foreground objects, making them easier to study.

NASA, ESA, CSA, I. Labbe (Swinburne University of Technology) and R. Bezanson (University of Pittsburgh). Image processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

Webb was built principally to look at the oldest and most distant objects in the universe, some of 13.4 billion light years away.

But doesn't prevent the telescope from peering into its own back yard.

This image of Saturn and some of its 146 moons, rivals the images obtained by the Pioneer and Voyager probes.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Matt Tiscareno (SETI Institute), Matt Hedman (University of Idaho), Maryame El Moutamid (Cornell University), Mark Showalter (SETI Institute), Leigh Fletcher (University of Leicester), Heidi Hammel (AURA). Image processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)

Infant stars are born all over the universe, but the closest stellar birthing suite to Earth is the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, located just 460 light years distant.

A turbulent — even violent — place, Rho Ophiuchi is defined by jets of gas roaring from young stars.

Most of the stars in this comparatively modest nursery are more or less the size of the sun.

But one, known as S1, is far bigger — so much so that it is self-immolating, carving a great cavity around itself with its stellar wind, the storm of charged particle's all stars emit, though few with the gale-force power of S1.

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI)

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Ian Curtis and Bernard Sumner, 1979.

[tingedorange]

YUGYEOM. For GQ Korea (2024).

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[testoster0ne]

dillon by hollywood_bruisers

[joy1306]

Yellow Flower & Pure Smile 🌼

[crows-before-bros]

Caught this Belted Kingfisher flying around the area. I don't think crows like them that much.

[misforgotten2]

Bah. Shutterbug.

National Geographic Magazine - December 1967

[gunshub]

[aashimagurjar]

MDW

04/20

[retrokid92]

Flute Man