Pic of the Week: The Starry Night Story

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. (MoMA)

This week’s image is from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. It shows Vincent Van Gogh’s famous painting The Starry Night. Created during his time at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy, it is believed Van Gogh painted the piece in June 1989. But is it a true recreation of the night sky that June?

In a recent study, scientists from South Korea stated they now believe the painting shows the night sky on July 22, 1989 with its portrayal of the Moon, Venus, and the Hyades star cluster in the constellation Taurus. The team of scientists used various pieces of evidence, including letters from the artist, to get a better idea of the night sky and weather during that summer.

You can read more about this new study, The Actual Sky of Van Gogh’s Starry Night: a Multidisciplinary Reconstruction, at this link.

If you are simply interested in the art itself, this link at MoMA will tell you more.

Pic of the Week: Nebula Pa 30 – Space Fireworks

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Nebula Pa 30 as captured by the Gemini North Telescope. (International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSG/AURA)

This week’s image is from the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii. The spectacular explosion you see here is not the end of the Death Star, but rather Nebula Pa 30.

Here is what NASA’s Astronomy Photo of the Day website has to say about this image:

It is likely the remnant of an old supernova explosion: separate historical records by Chinese, Japanese and Arabic astronomers tell of a “guest star” that appeared in the sky for 185 days in the year 1181. It is believed that this bright new point of light came from the supernova that caused the fireworks in Pa 30. Astronomers don’t know exactly what happened in this unusual explosion, classified as a Type Iax supernova, but it is thought to be caused by the merger of two white dwarfs. The mysterious central star in the image is extremely hot and produces a strong wind, possibly forming the radial filaments. Look closely at them: those pearl-like knots stringing the filaments are 4 light-days in diameter. Understanding how a supernova created this amazing nebula continues an 845-year old mystery (and counting).

Pic of the Week: The Flower Bud Nebula

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): JWST’s view of NGC 7129. (NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI))

This week’s image is from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It shows the overwhelmingly bright and active NGC 7129, also known as the Flower Bud Nebula, located about 3,300 light-years away.

NASA provided a helpful story explaining what you are seeing in the image above:

The stars from this cluster are in different stages of their development, as the more massive stars form and evolve the fastest. The most massive (and the most mature) is the region’s luminous central star, LkH(alpha) 234 (pronounced Lick-H-alpha). This star, which sports the image’s most prominent diffraction pattern, is a pre-main-sequence star weighing around 5 to 8 times the mass of our Sun. Pre-main-sequence stars like these have mostly finished gathering mass and are contracting under the force of gravity, causing their temperatures to rise. In time, this star will fuse its own hydrogen like our Sun.

The cavity to its left, which appears in gold and spans about 3.5 light-years, is the largest demonstration of the central star’s impact. Outflows from an earlier stage of the star’s life cycle carve into the dense molecular cloud of hydrogen. Both the outflows and the star’s light energize the gas, causing it to glow. While much of this hydrogen gas is blown away, a large amount is also compressed, creating the conditions for even more stars to form.

Pic of the Week: Colorful IC 348

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): IC 348 as captured by NASA’s JWST recently observed IC 348. (NASA, ESA, CSA, Kevin Luhman (PSU), Catarina Alves de Oliveira (ESA), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Webb))

This week’s image is from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). With its sharp, amazing colors you would not think it is real, yet you are looking at a star-forming region about 1,000 light-years away called IC 348.

Here is NASA’s description of what you are seeing:

In regions like IC 348, cold clouds of molecular hydrogen gas collapse to form new stars, creating glowing, sculpted scenes like this one. The star-formation process can create widely varied objects, from massive stars that expire after only a few million years in core-collapse supernova explosions to the smallest and most common stars, which are long lived and produce powerful stellar storms.The smallest stars weigh in at around 8 percent of the Sun’s mass. Below this mass lies a strange class of objects called brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs form in the same way stars do, through the collapse of molecular clouds. However, unlike stars, the cores of brown dwarfs never become hot enough to fuse ordinary hydrogen into helium (though many briefly fuse deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, early in their lives).

Pic of the Week: 2026 Astronomy Photographer of the Year Winner

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Image (Credit): “The Quiet Predator” by Ali Alobaidly.

This week’s image is the winning entry in the ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2026 contest at the Royal Museums Greenwich. The photo of the Shark Nebula is titled “The Quiet Predator,” and it was submitted by Ali Alobaidly.

Here is how Ali Alobaidly describes his photo:

 The Shark Nebula (LDN 1235) prowls 650 light years away in the constellation Cepheus, its silhouette carved not from flesh and teeth, but from interstellar dust dense enough to block starlight.

This predator drifts silently through space, camouflaged against the faint glow of the background stars, lit only by nearby blue-coloured reflection nebulae.

Unlike its oceanic cousins, the Shark Nebula doesn’t bite, but it does photobomb astrophotographers with a molecular cloud big enough to make Earth look like a speck of plankton.

You can see the other winning and shortlisted images at the main site.