Thursday, December 21, 2006

Galactic greetings.


This Christmas tree light-like display is an image of one of our galaxy's centers of new star formation, called W3. It was made by Harvard's and NASA's orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory (see here) (named for the great astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar), and the image was downloaded from Alan Boyle's splendid Cosmic Log, on MSNBC.

4 comments:

  1. That is awe-inspiring! Magnificent! Thanks for posting it.

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  2. thanks for the christmas lights, claude! a very merry christmas to you too!

    having seen that photo, i'm now feeling a bit less grinchy about not having put up any lights around my place [the pets take the decorations down faster than i can put them up].

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  3. ps. i didn't mean to be deliberately obfuscatory, commenting here as one of my alter-identities. it just worked out that way.

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  4. I hope you had a merry Merry, and a cool Yule.

    Blessings for your next 13 moons!

    p.s. I think it's cool that you've got Smoking Mirrors linked!

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