Stars & Nebulae Archives - Escape Velocity Space News

Topic: Stars & Nebulae

Europa Clipper Joins in on the Star Observing

by Pamela Gay | Mar 11, 2025 | Stars & Nebulae

It doesn’t take a lot of telescope to make the number of visible stars radically increase, in it turns out even the Europa clipper, with its several centimeter star tracker cameras, has been regularly making its own observations. The Clipper launched October 14, 2024 and flew past Mars on March 1 while traveling out toward Jupiter and its moon Europa. Along the way, Clipper is checking several of its systems. At Mars, it used its thermal imager to take some test images. That was cool, but not necessary. Required for its mission are the Clipper’s star trackers which are used to very...

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Don Pettit Proves Stars Can Be Tracked From ISS

by Pamela Gay | Jan 21, 2025 | Stars & Nebulae

Photo taken by Astronaut Don Pettit from ISS: Milky Way with Zodiacal light and Starlink satellites streaking by. Astronaut Don Pettit is, among many other things, an amateur astronomer. One of the most delightful moments of my life with getting to hear him talk to...

Ep. 3.03 Mars is the future, the day the Dinos Died, a Star’s Death in 3 Acts, and more

by EVSN | Sep 4, 2024 | Earth Science, Podcast, Solar Systems, Stars & Nebulae, Video

I have to admit, realizing it is somehow late August was a bit startling. I’m not entirely sure where my summer went, but I am grateful that my garden is finally producing veg, and the temps are starting to slowly trend downward. The Dog Days of summer are named for...

A Star’s Death in Three Acts

by Pamela Gay | Sep 4, 2024 | Stars & Nebulae

While monitoring the sky with optical systems, we’ve found some really weird stuff. Back in 2018, the All Sky Automated Survey for Super Novae discovered a brightening galaxy. Follow -up observations in the X-Ray found the kinds of high energy light that signals a...

Closer Look: Sometimes Dust is Beautiful

by Pamela Gay | Jul 3, 2024 | Galaxies & Cosmology, Stars & Nebulae

Gaia galaxy map, image credit: ESA The interstellar medium is not my favorite topic in astronomy. Fundamentally, it is the study of interstellar dust bunnies - those clumps of gas and dust that clog up our skies and block our ability to see more distant stars and...

Black Hole & Baby Star Formation – It’s the Same Science

by Pamela Gay | Jul 2, 2024 | Stars & Nebulae

One of the great rules of astronomy is that the same rules of physics we see here, in our corner of the universe are the same rules of physics that control all of space and time. Mostly… some forces only work on tiny scales, so at the atomic level it feels like things...

Ep. 2.23: Planning to go back to the Moon

by EVSN | Jun 19, 2024 | Galaxies & Cosmology, Podcast, Rockets, Stars & Nebulae

Let's take a quick tour of the latest news, including updates on the Hubble Space Telescopes and single gyro operations, EUCLID's image release, an amazing new image of Io by LBT, and new calculations of Pluto's oceans. We also look in detail at plans to return humans...

The butterfly that was actually a planet forming disk

by Pamela Gay | Jun 3, 2024 | Stars & Nebulae

Object IRAS 23077+6707 The sky is littered with small fuzzy blobs that are chock full of science waiting to be understood. And one such fuzzy blob looks surreally like a butterfly. Discovered in 2016, this object, cataloged as IRAS 23077+6707, is located about...

Stellar Winds Spotted on Three Sun-like Stars

by Pamela Gay | May 8, 2024 | Stars & Nebulae

Infrared image of the shockwave (red arc) created by the massive giant star Zeta Ophiuchi in an interstellar dust cloud. The tenuous winds of sun-like main-sequence stars are much more difficult to observe. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech; NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team...

Massive Object Detected Via Gravitational Puppetry

by Pamela Gay | May 8, 2024 | Galaxies & Cosmology, Stars & Nebulae

A screenshot from a visualization of the orbit of the Gaia BH3 system as a whole through the Milky Way. Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC- CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO. Acknowledgments: Stefan Jordan with Gaia Sky. The universe we see doesn’t always reflect the universe that is out there....

Stars are Messy Cannibals

by Pamela Gay | May 8, 2024 | Stars & Nebulae

This image, taken with the VLT Survey Telescope hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, shows the beautiful nebula NGC 6164/6165, also known as the Dragon’s Egg. The nebula is a cloud of gas and dust surrounding a pair of stars called HD 148937. Credit: ESO/VPHAS+ team....

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