• Holiday goodies from deep space

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA

    NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, captured this color-coded picture of a star-forming nebula that resembles a Christmas wreath. The cloud of gas and dust, known as Barnard 3, lies in the constellation Perseus, about 1,000 light-years from Earth. The evergreen-colored ring is made up of tiny particles of warm dust. The red cloud, which stands in for the wreath's bow, is probably made of dust that is more metallic and cooler than the surrounding regions. Astronomers say the bright star in the middle of the red cloud, called HD 278942, has cleared out the dust in the central regions to create the glowing wreathlike shape. Bluish background and foreground stars are sprinkled through the scene like silver bells.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News



    Space scientists have dropped off some last-minute presents for Christmas: stunning pictures from deep space, many of which have a holiday theme.

    Today, the team behind NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer delivered a picture of a nebula that looks just like a Christmas wreath if you tweak the colors just right. That gift comes on top of a celestial bauble from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, as well as a lucky cosmic horseshoe and a cosmic snow angel from the Hubble Space Telescope.

    The imaging team for NASA's Cassini orbiter, currently into its seventh year at Saturn, dropped off a huge plate of holiday treats, with best wishes from team leader Carolyn Porco.

    "As another year traveling this magnificent sector of our solar system draws to a close, all of us on Cassini wish all of you a very happy and peaceful holiday season," Porco said in today's image advisory.

    Go ahead and enjoy the holiday display:

    NASA / CXC / Univ. of Potsdam / ESA / XMM-Newton / AURA / CTIO

    This picture of a "celestial bauble" combines X-ray imagery (in blue) from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton probe with optical data (in red and green) from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The bright blue spark at right is a pulsar known as SXP 1062, surrounded by the shell of a supernova remnant. The optical data also reveals spectacular formations of gas and dust in a star-forming region on the left side.

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI

    The colorful globe of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, passes in front of the planet and its rings in this true-color snapshot from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The imagery was obtained on May 21 when Cassini was 1.4 million miles from Titan.

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI

    Saturn's third-largest moon, Dione, can be seen through the haze of Titan, with the planet and its rings in the background, in a May 21 picture from Cassini.

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI

    Dione, the bright-colored Saturnian moon seen at top in this picture from the Cassini spacecraft, is about 700 miles wide. Titan, which appears to sit below Dione, is 3,200 miles wide. The reason Dione looks bigger is because Cassini was much closer to Dione when the picture was taken on Nov. 6. Dione is 85,000 miles away, while Titan is 684,000 miles away.

    NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI

    A close-up view of the Saturnian moon Titan reveals a depression within the moon's orange and blue haze layers, near the moon's south pole. The picture was taken by the Cassini spacecraft on Sept. 11. The moon's high altitude haze layer appears blue here, while the main atmospheric haze is orange. The difference in color could be due to particle size of the haze. The blue haze likely consists of smaller particles than the orange haze.

    The bipolar star-forming region, called Sharpless 2-106, or S106 for short, looks like a soaring, celestial snow angel. This movie presents a visualization of the star-forming region known as S106. The Hubble image is augmented with additional field-of-view from the Subaru Infrared Telescope.
    (Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon, T. Borders, L. Frattare, Z. Levay, and F. Summers / Viz 3D team, STScI)

    For still more holiday goodies, check out our Year in Space Pictures slideshow. You'll see the celestial snow angel as well as Hubble's view of the fiery galaxy Centaurus A and other glorious pictures from the past year. Happy holidays, from yours truly and all the other good folks who contribute to Cosmic Log and PhotoBlog!

    Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Be my X-ray valentine

    X-ray: NASA /CXC /MIT / S.Rappaport et al, Optical: NASA / STScI

    This image shows Arp 147, a pair of interacting galaxies some 430 million light years from Earth, as seen by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. The ring-shaped object on the right is a remnant of a spiral galaxy that collided with the elliptical galaxy to the left millions of years ago.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Here's a piece of eye candy to share with your honey this Valentine's Day: a colorful ring of stars encrusted with black holes that cast a pink glow, thanks to a little creative image processing.

    The pink areas represent X-ray emissions detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. Visible-light readings from the Hubble Space Telescope give the ring its red, green, and blue colors.

    So what are we actually seeing? This is a pair of interacting galaxies known as Arp 147, located about 430 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Cetus. The unusual arrangement was formed when the remnant spiral galaxy (right) collided with the elliptical galaxy on the left. The collision produced an expanding wave of star formation that shows up here as a blue ring containing an abundance of massive young stars. These stars race through their evolution in a few million years and explode as supernovae, leaving behind neutron stars and black holes, as explained in a Chandra  image advisory.

    Some of these neutron stars and black holes have companion stars and can become bright X-ray sources as they pull in matter from these companions. The nine X-ray sources scattered around the ring in Arp 147 are so bright that they must be black holes, with masses likely 10 to 20 times that of the sun.

    X-ray: NASA /CXC /MIT / S.Rappaport et al, Optical: NASA / STScI

    This composite image of Arp 147 shows Chandra X-ray data in pink, Hubble optical data in red, green and blue, ultraviolet GALEX data in green and infrared Spitzer data in red

    The image also shows an X-ray source in what astronomers believe is a poorly fed supermassive black hole in the center of the red galaxy. Other objects in the image include a foreground star (visible at lower left) and a background quasar (seen as the pink source above and to the left of the reddish galaxy).

    Infrared observations of Arp 147 with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and ultraviolet observations with NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer allowed astronomers to estimate the rate of star formation in the ring. According to their calculations, the most intense star formation ended about 15 million years ago in Earth's time frame.

    The findings appeared in the Oct. 1 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by hitting the "like" button on the Cosmic Log Facebook page or following msnbc.com's science editor, Alan Boyle, on Twitter (@b0yle).

  • Happy holidays from space

    NASA / CXC

    X-ray images from four celestial phenomena — the supernova remnants G292.0+1.8 and 3C58, the Cat's Eye Nebula and the spiral galaxy NGC 4631 — have been combined to produce this holiday graphic from the Chandra X-ray Center.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

    Astronomers and artists are making it easy to turn beautiful imagery from outer space into greetings for the holiday season. You just have to know where to look ... and be a little crafty yourself.

    For example, the Space Telescope Science Institute is offering 25 designs based on Hubble Space Telescope imagery that are suitable for printing as greeting cards. Some of the cards incorporate the latest, greatest pictures that were sent down last year after Hubble's final servicing mission. You can print out the cards at home, but you'll get the best result if you bring the images in to a photo or print shop.

    Or maybe you don't need to print out a single card. Instead, how about sending out space images as e-cards? The team behind NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory offers an assortment of e-cards for lots of occasions, ranging from Thanksgiving to Valentine's Day, from the Fourth of July to birthdays. The false-color X-ray hues make for a festive look. Heck, some of the cards are even animated.

    The Space Weather Center offers more e-cards that feature astronomical images as well as high-energy experiments here on Earth.

    Even astronauts appreciate getting holiday greetings, and NASA is offering an easy way to send a postcard to the International Space Station, with no postage required. Just use this Flash-enabled website to select a card and write your message. As an alternative, you can send a holiday tweet to the Twitter account used by NASA's astronauts. If you hurry, you can get your message in before three of the space station's crew members take a Thanksgiving trip back down to Earth (departure is scheduled for 8:22 p.m. ET on Turkey Day.) 

    Another way to celebrate the holiday season, space-style, is to click your way through an online Advent calendar. The idea comes from the tradition of making calendars with little doors that children can open for each day from Dec. 1 to 25. A treat can be found inside each door -- with the biggest and best treat behind the door for Christmas Day, of course.

    A couple of years ago, Alan Taylor at The Big Picture began the tradition of unveiling a fresh Hubble picture for each day between Dec. 1 and Christmas -- and last year, the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla joined in on the fun with an Advent calendar featuring solar system views. (Her calendar ran all the way through the end of the year.)

    I've linked to last year's offerings, but it's a safe bet that there'll be a fresh crop of glorious views for this Advent season, beginning a week from today. In fact, you just might see a different kind of spaced-out Advent calendar right here on Cosmic Log.

    Speaking of calendars, I always look forward to the 12-month space calendars offered by the European Space Agency's Hubble team. The new calendar is usually posted to the SpaceTelescope.org website pretty late in the season, but this year there's a work-around. Because the days and dates line up in 2011 the same way they did in 2005, you can simply adapt the 2005 calendar files for the coming year. It doesn't hurt that the 2005 edition has some of my favorites, such as the Cat's Eye Nebula and the Red Rectangle.

    Crafty, no?

    If you have other suggestions for giving the holiday season a space spin, feel free to pass them along in your comments below. And if you need a little extra holiday cheer from space, check out our latest roundup of cosmic imagery for the Month in Space Pictures. Here are links to bigger versions of the images featured in this month's slideshow:

    Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.