Quantum Spirit: Southern Skies Revealed in Detail

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Southern Skies Revealed in Detail

The Swan Nebula as photographed through the VST.

A section of our universe previously not photographed now is visible to all due to a newly installed super telescope. The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) recently snapped its first impressive images of the southern sky over the Paranal Observatory in Chile.

The state-of-the-art telescope is the latest addition to the European Southern Observatory's network of telescopes at Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The first image released from the VST shows the spectacular star-forming region Messier 17, also known as the Omega nebula or the Swan nebula, as it has never been seen before.

According to LiveScience.com:

This nebula, full of gas, dust and hot young stars, lies in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, in the constellation of Sagittarius (The Archer). The VST's field of view is so large that is able to observe the entire nebula, including its fainter outer parts.
The second of the newly released images is a portrait of the star cluster Omega Centauri in unprecedented detail. Omega Centauri is the largest globular cluster in the sky and the VST's view includes about 300,000 stars.

The VST and its OmegaCAM over the next five years will make three detailed surveys of the southern sky. The data will be made public for astronomers around the world to analyze.

Click here for the article, including a video.

1 comment:

Busana Muslim said...: Thanks for sharing these important information.; February 11, 2012 at 10:55 AM

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Quotations to Ponder

"If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'Thank you,' that would suffice."

~ Meister Eckhart, 14th-century mystic

"Death is not extinguishing the light ~ it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come."

~ Rabindranath Tagore

"There shall be signs in the Sun, and in the Moon, and in the Stars."

~ Gospel of Luke, 21:25

"The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit."
~ Gospel of John, 3:8

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience."

~ Teilhard de Chardin

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science."

~ Albert Einstein

"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away."

~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives."

~ William James

"When one door of happiness closes, another opens. But often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us."

~ Helen Keller

"There are only two ways to live your life ~ as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is a miracle."

~ Albert Einstein

"He who's not busy being born

Is busy dying."

~ Bob Dylan

"A mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."

~ John Milton

17th-century English poet

"This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."

~ The Dalai Lama

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."
~ Albert Einstein

Attributions

I Ching commentaries on my blog are from the classic The I Ching or Book of Changes, translated by Richard Wilhelm with a Forward by Carl Jung, Princeton University Press, 1950. By the way, when selecting entries for my blog, I don't "throw" anything to discover the hexagram - I simply open the book at random and see what's there.

Selections from the Tao Te Ching are from Stephen Mitchell's translation.

Aesop's fables on my blogs are from Aesop's Fables, translated by Laura Gibbs, Oxford University Press, 2002.

Biblical selections are from The Holy Bible, New King James Version of both the Old and New Testament.