BAN #385: Odd pills, From Orion to Cygnus

[The planetary nebula M 2-9, winds from a dying star. Credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble Legacy Archive / Judy Schmidt]

Subscribers stretch across the sky.

Blog Jam

What I’ve recently written on the blog, ICYMI

[Actual images of stars orbiting the supermassive black hole in the Milky Way’s center. From Wednesday’s article. Credit: ESO/GRAVITY collaboration]

Monday 13 December, 2021: What does a red giant look like up close? REALLY up close?

Tuesday 14 December, 2021: Amazing new images show stars flung around by the Milky Way's enormous central black hole

Wednesday 15 December, 2021: Binary pulsar puts Einstein to the test… and he passes. Relatively speaking.

Thursday 16 December, 2021: Sampling M87's DNA: Double helix jet blasting away from the galaxy's huge black hole

Friday 17 December, 2021: A colossal collision between supermassive black holes may explain Andromeda’s weird core

Apropos of nothing

Not everything needs to be themed

Does this bug anyone else as much as it does me?

[Pills mod 2 ≠ 0. Aiiiiiieeeee! Credit: Phil Plait]

It irritates my wife, too, for that matter.

It’s silly, and meaningless, but somehow takes on a much larger mantle that it ought to. If this goes on long enough then it carries over to the next pack, that one lingering decongestant taunting me. Did I accidentally at some point only take one, or three? Did I drop one and lose it, and had to grab an extra to make up for it?

This photo is from the most recent occurrence of this damnable asymmetry, though it ended happily when I found the missing pill on the floor of my office not long after. Oddly, it happened right after an earlier incident where we were missing one for weeks, and after living with this off-balance monstrosity mocking me from my medicine cabinet I happened to go through my backpack, which I use for travel and keep some pills in. There was a pack of Sudafed there, and it was missing one as well. I popped it out and put it with the odd-numbered box, and the world was set balanced on its axis once again.

It’s not like there aren’t larger things to worry about. And yet. Our brains are weird.

Pic o’ the Letter

A cool or lovely or mind-bending astronomical image/video with a short description so you can grok it

Not long ago on the blog I wrote about a fairly intense mosaic of the constellation Cygnus made by Finnish astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio. It was part of a larger mosaic that covered a staggering 120° of sky.

I got an email from him recently saying that he had expanded this again, and now has a mosaic that covers the sky from Cygnus all the way to Orion, covering 145°!

Here it is:

[HUGE mosaic of the sky from Orion to Cygnus. Credit: J-P Metsavainio]

Oh, you’re disappointed? Well, that’s because I had to shrink it down to 2000 pixels wide to fit the newsletter. The original is 120,000 x 18,000 pixels (!!!) so, yeah. That wouldn’t fit well in an email.

So take a look at this 7,000 x 1,100 pixel version on his site to make it way, way better. He also has a pan-and-zoom interactive version that is 40,000 x 6,000, and it’s fun to scroll around it.

The colors are odd, because this is not a natural-color (that is, RGB) image. In this 1,500 hours of exposures (!!) creating over 300 individual images that he stitched together, he used narrow-band filters; that is, ones that let through a very specific wavelength of light. These filters select emission from atoms of oxygen (blue in the image), hydrogen (green), and sulfur (red). The colors aren’t chromatic — for example, hydrogen glows red, not green — but that’s OK. The end result isn’t supposed to be science so much as art, and it’s really quite amazing and lovely. Anyway, the filters select interstellar gas over stars, so they are extremely prominent while stars are much less so.

Looking at the mosaic it took me a moment to get my bearings, but then a bunch of objects became recognizable, like the North American Nebula, the Heart and Soul Nebulae, the Lambda Orionis glow, Barnard’s Loop, and a wee tiny little Horsehead Nebula (look those up to keep yourself entertained for a while). Lots of strongly, filamentary supernova remnants are visible too.

Cygnus is a summer constellation more or less, and Orion winter, so this mosaic covers an immense amount of celestial real estate. Very cool!

I’ll note he sells prints on his website, too, if you’re looking for a lovely gifts for someone or just treating yourself.

Et alia

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!