NGC 602 is a young bright cluster of stars located in the Small Magellanic Clouds. For those of you who don’t know the Small Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy that is 7000 light years wide (compared to our 400,000 light year width of the Milky Way). Fun fact is that this dwarf galaxy had the unfortunate run in with our beast of a galaxy and transformed into an irregular shape galaxy. It is also 200,000 light years away but it’s one of the closest neighbours to our own galaxy. In the image you can see that the radiation and shock wave from the star forming area in the center pushed away all the gas and lighter elements. It’s a gorgeous photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.  

 A very common question we all ask is where have meteors fallen on Earth? Also how big are these rocks or how heavy are they? These are good questions to ask to know the real danger of these space travellers. Well I took this first image from a cool facebook page called The Earth Story, check them out if you have time.   VERY KNOWN METEORITE FALL ON EARTH This map shows every meteorite fall on Earth that we know about; where scientists have found either meteorites or impact craters. Some of these craters and meteorite fragments date as far back as the year 2,300 BCE. The data for the image is from the US Meteorological Society and does not show places where meteorites might have fallen but no trace has yet been found.To view the interactive map, where you can click on each meteorite spot to learn more, go here: http://bit.ly/Xmuvy5   The data used for the image is available...

  This is the gorgeous spiral galaxy M106 or also known as NGC 4258. It is located 23.5 million light years away and it would take you 80,000 light years to cross from one end of the galaxy to the other. What is interesting about this particular galaxy is the fact that it has an unusual amount of arms. It has 4 arms that are in spiral formation and the two arms that are mostly red (known as anomalous arms, because they don’t line up well with the other arms) is hydrogen that is spewing out from the supermassive black hole. That red color is also an indicator to astronomers that the hydrogen is excited. So what is causing all this excitement? The jets coming from the supermassive black hole are likely to be caused by matter falling into it then the beam of cosmic death rays shoot out and excite the material around it. This is not a galaxy you would want to fly anywhere near because...

V838 Monocerotis is located 20,000 light years away in the constellation Monoceros. It’s one of the most interesting red variable stars (variable star is a star whose brightness fluctuates as seen from Earth) because at first astronomers thought this was a classic case of a nova but in fact it’s something completely different and to make matters even juicier, they aren’t even sure why! This red star is 5-10 times the mass of our own Sun and has been seen rapidly heating up and expanding in matter of months! This is rarely seen with stars and is telling about how fast this is all happening.   Source: http://observatory.open.ac.uk/data_store/fun_stuff/v838_monocerotis.html Make sure to check out the smoother animation in the source link! It’s even better!

  How humble a beautiful gas cloud in space looks. Amazing.   This is one of the most beautiful space pictures I have seen. To be honest I haven’t seen even that many animations of gas clouds but just wow. What makes this really cool is that you are looking at a gas cloud that expands over 100 light years! This is where the birth of a star begins. This is its story that has yet unfolded. The attraction of the gravity from the mass of the hydrogen gas and the dirt will form a star. Depending on how much clumps together will of course depend on the size of the star. This is how it starts. This is how we started. Our humble beginnings.      

Have you seen Jupiter or Beteleguese in the night sky? Well I went out to take pictures of Jupiter and Betelgeuse in the night sky. I live in Maple, ON or where Canada’s wonderland is. The light pollution is still pretty bad I even had to darken the photo and then make the temperature cooler so that you could see the stars better. I just wanted to point out one star in particular Betelgeuse.   Click the image to get a better look!   So hopefully you can see the comparison of the two. One I took of course and the other is from a free program I use on my Mac called Stellarium. You can see the cross in picture  near the roof of the house that I took and you can compare it with this second one. Betelgeuse is on the left end of the cross. What’s so crazy about Betelgeuse is REALLY BIG. If it were in our solar system it would go PAST Jupiter! Now we know that from the...