Pages

Sunday, December 26, 2010

Waves Breaking in the Stellar Lagoon


This close-up shot of the center of the Lagoon Nebula (Messier 8) clearly shows the delicate structures formed when the powerful radiation of young stars interacts with the hydrogen cloud they formed from.

This image was created from exposures taken with the Wide Field Channel of the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on Hubble. Light from glowing hydrogen (through the F658N filter) is colored red. Light from ionized nitrogen (through the F660N filter) is colored green and light through a yellow filter (F550M) is colored blue. The exposure times through each filter are 1560 seconds, 1600 seconds and 400 seconds respectively. The blue-white flare at the upper-left of the image is scattered light from a bright star just outside the field of view. The field of view is about 3.3 by 1.7 arcminutes.

Photo credit: NASA, ESA

No comments: