Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Heavenly gemstones for the holiday!

May the light of a thousand suns brighten your New Year!

Happy Solstice!


Courtesy NASA and ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Hubble has captured the most detailed image to date of the open star cluster NGC 290 in the Small Magellanic Cloud.

The image taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope show a myriad of stars in crystal clear detail. The brilliant open star cluster, NGC 290, is located about 200,000 light-years away and is roughly 65 light-years across.

Credit:

European Space Agency & NASA

Acknowledgements:
Davide de Martin (ESA/Hubble) and Edward W. Olszewski (University of Arizona, USA)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Joyous Solstice Michelle!

Anonymous said...

that's breathtaking. Thanks for finding & sharing. And happy solstice!

Michelle Wood said...

Hi Ladies,

Glad you liked it. There are many more pictures of space, planets, stars, auroras, you-name-it at Astronomy Picture of the Day http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope website at http://www.spacetelescope.org/

Some of the pictures are just incredible.

Check out these photos of Earth from Saturn:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060927.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap061016.html

Enjoy! :-)

Anonymous said...

Hi,

This Solstice is very very wonderful.
we never watch Look like. The image includes many of stars and planets. Like that I had some gemstones jewelers. They are very very rare.The stones are round, oval and pear shaped