The Ringed Planet

Saturns north pole hexagon.

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Messier 1 - The Crab Nebula

Potentially Humanity’s First Historically Observed Supernova

The Crab Nebula is the first astronomical object identified with a historical supernova explosion. Around in the year 1054, Chinese astronomers identified a large bright object that suddenly and mysteriously appeared in the sky. The explosion was so bright that it was even visible during the day time.

700 years later the super nova remnant faded in brightness as it expanded and was nearly forgotten. The Super Nova Remnant was rediscovered in 1758 ( officially re-recorded) by Charles Messier while he was creating a catalog of mysterious objects that looked like comets but were not.

We now know that the beautiful Crab Nebula is the magnificent result of the death of a star, which was unknown to Charles Messier and the Chinese Astronomers that discovered the Object. Now, thanks to space telescopes such as Hubble and Chandra, we can image the Nebula in great detail. The bottom left image is of a small region of the Crab Nebula. It shows “Rayleigh–Taylor instabilities in its intricate filamentary structure” and gives scientists a better understanding of the death of stars. The image to the bottom left shows combined visible light data from Hubble and x-ray data from Chandra.

Credit: NASA/Hubble/Chandra

Fluorite and Sphalerite

Locality: La Viesca, Asturias, Spain

Dark Blue Azurite on Limonite

Locality:  Touissit, Touissit District, Jerada Province, Oriental Region, Morocco.

Itty bitty Mercury transits the Sun. It was a terribly cloudy morning with really poor seeing, but managed to snap this. 

The Sunflower Galaxy

Plumbogummite

Locality:  Yangshuo Mine, Yangshuo Co., Guilin Pref., Guangxi Zhuang, China

Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn

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