Consider the Lobster
EYE ON THE SKY
Our roundup of this month’s best images from the world’s best telescopes
VICTOR M BLANCO TELESCOPE, 12 SEPTEMBER 2022
This spectacular image marks 10 years of Cerro Tololo Observatory’s dark-energy-hunting camera
The Lobster Nebula, NGC 6357 in Scorpius, glows majestically in this image taken by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) at NOIRLab’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, high in the Chilean Andes. The 570-megapixel image shows a starforming region 8,000 lightyears from Earth in which twisting braids of dust are shaped by magnetic fields, winds and radiation, and protostars shine through cocoons of the material that formed them.
It was released to celebrate DECam’s 10th year of operation, a decade in which the four-tonne camera, the Blanco Telescope’s primary instrument, has taken over a million images. Studying hundreds of millions of galaxies, their motions and conditions, its mission is to investigate the mystery of the unknown force that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the Universe – dark energy. Joining the hunt is the upcoming Vera C Rubin Observatory, which you can find out more about here.
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Explore a gallery of these and more stunning space images www.skyatnightmagazine.com/bonus-content/GD67VIT
The two Tarantulas
JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE, 6 SEPTEMBER 2022
Two views of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud as never seen before. The first image used Webb’s near-infrared camera (NIRcam) to show the star-forming region and its abundant protostars, uncovering spectral data that can reveal the age of the nebula and how many generations of star birth it has seen. The second image used Webb’s mid-infrared MIRI instrument shows glowing gas and dust, blue hydrocarbons prominent, lit by energetic stars.
Galactic overlap
HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE, 5 SEPTEMBER 2022
SDSS J115331 and LEDA 2073461 may not sound very exciting, but the identification of these galaxies certainly was. The remarkable overlap of these spirals was first spotted in Hubble data by volunteers from the Galaxy Zoo project. The telescope was then sent back for a better look, resulting in this image. Both galaxies are over a billion lightyears from Earth, and nowhere near each other, but the coincidental alignment certainly makes for an arresting image.
The rings of Neptune
JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE, 21 SEPTEMBER 2022
Neptune doesn’t get a lot of love, but who could resist those rings? This image, another from Webb’s NIRCam instrument, picks up the faint, dusty encircling system, some of which has gone unseen since Voyager 2 passed by in 1989. Also in the image are the large moon Triton and six smaller satellites, which adds up to half of the ice giant’s 14 known companions.
Brace for impact
DART, 26 SEPTEMBER 2022
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) probe smashed into Dimorphos, the moonlet of asteroid Didymos, at the end of September, to test whether dangerous-looking asteroids or comets could be similarly deflected from Earth in the future. In its dying seconds, DART sent back these images. Dimorphos is silicate in nature and the impact produced a cloud of ejecta now being studied using ground- and space-based telescopes. Turn to our Bulletin to read more about the aims of the DART mission.