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13 posts total
Kelly Lepo

Six views of Saturn from the Hubble Space Telescope in different filters.

While this looks like pop art, these images show Saturn in different combinations of filters, mapped to red, green, and blue colors. The planet and its rings shift hues based on how strongly they reflect light at different wavelengths. Each filter combination emphasizes subtle differences in cloud altitude or composition.

hubblesite.org/contents/media/

#Space #Astronomy #Hubble #Saturn #SciArt

Six views of Saturn from the Hubble Space Telescope in different filters.

While this looks like pop art, these images show Saturn in different combinations of filters, mapped to red, green, and blue colors. The planet and its rings shift hues based on how strongly they reflect light at different wavelengths. Each filter combination emphasizes subtle differences in cloud altitude or composition.

A six-panel collage titled "Saturn, August 22, 2024, HST WFC3/UVIS." This "Warhol-esque" array of six images of Saturn is arranged in two rows and three columns. First row: In the upper left image, Saturn is in shades of green and blue with pink rings. The color mapping is F395N blue, F502N green, FQ727N red. In the upper middle image, Saturn looks close to true color, with a yellow planet and white rings. The color mapping is F395N blue, F502N green, F631N red. In the upper right image, Saturn is in shades of blue with yellow at the equator and orange rings. The color mapping is F225W blue, F502N green, FQ727N red. Second row: In the bottom left image, Saturn is in shades of purple with green rings. The color mapping is F467M blue, FQ727N green, F763M red. In the bottom middle image, Saturn is in shades of blue with green at the equator and orange rings. The color mapping is F225W blue, F631N green, FQ889N red. In the bottom right image, Saturn is in shades of light purple with yellow at the equator and yellow rings. The color mapping is F225W blue, F467M green, F763M red.
11 December at 18:11 | Open on astrodon.social
Kelly Lepo

WebbVR from @spacetelescope just launched the 5.0 update, which adds images and video for 25 new JWST discoveries.

If you have a VR headset sitting around, it's worth checking out.

store.steampowered.com/app/891

Logo fro WebbVR: The James Webb Telescope Virtual Experience, with JWST's hexagon-shaped, segmented mirror. Behind the logo is a model of the telescope and the Cosmic Cliffs in the Carina nebula,an image of bright eight-pointed stars scattered across a dense orange-brown undulating cloudscape below a deep blue starscape.
25 September at 20:43 | Open on astrodon.social
Kelly Lepo

Mahalo to the folks at the Κ»Imiloa Astronomy Center for inviting a group of us from the STScI to come to the island of Hawai'i to collaborate, and for organizing a trip to the summit of Maunakea and a tour of the Keck observatories. What a special, beautiful, otherworldly place!

Selfie of me on top of Maunakea. I'm wearing a W.M. Keck Observatory hat and sunglasses. Behind me is a rocky landscape, with four telescope domes, sea of white cloud tops, and a blue sky above.
A large white telescope dome with a blue sky above. At the base of the dome is a sign for the W.M. Keck Observatory, visitor entrance.
A selfie of me taken in the mirror of the Keck 2 telescope, a large mirror made of hexagonal mirror segments. In the foreground is the support structures that hold the primary mirror, and in the background is the silver-colored telescope dome.
15 September at 8:39 | Open on astrodon.social
Kelly Lepo

I went on a tour of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center today with a group of students. The highlight was seeing (parts of) the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope being tested in the massive clean room.

From left to right, we see the spacecraft bus (where the computers, communications equipment, and propellent are housed), spare solar panels, and the coronagraph instrument (under the silver tent thing, near the wall of air filters).

A panorama shows the NASA Goddard clean room, a large, 4-story white room. In the room are several metal tables, testing equipment, scissor lifts, and parts of the telescope. The NASA Goddard logo is on the back wall. Several people are working, dressed head to toe in "bunny suits", white protective suits used to control contamination.
Closeup of the Roman telescope bus. A white metal structure holds a metal cylindrical ring with ridges. Behind this is the six-sided telescope bus structure. It is covered in shiny, metallic kapton, and has several smaller red boxes are connected by wires.
In the foreground, three people, dressed in white, protective "bunny suits", work on the back half of the telescope bus. It is a large, metal plate that is being held up by supports on its side, like a portable chalkboard. The people working on it have to stand on a stepladder to reach the top. Many pieces of equipment, which look like boxes wrapped like presents are fixed to the metal plate. In the middle of the clean room, near the left edge of the frame, are two people in bunny suits. One waves to the camera. In the background are the spare solar panels, arranged like a huge room dividing panel screen. The panels are at least twice the height of the people standing next to them. They are arranged three across and two high.
Equipment sits in the NASA Goddard clean room, a large, 4-story white room. On the right wall are rows of orange squares, which are a wall of air filters. In the bottom right corner of the frame is a rectangular, silvery tent-like structure that is open in the front. Inside is the coronograph instrument, which is wrapped in metallic kapton, and sitting inside a white metal support.
26 June at 3:00 | Open on astrodon.social
Joseph A di Paolantonio
poswald

@kellylepo wow that's a lot of air filters... are they all blowing the same direction? Where does the clean air come in from? That's amazing and I have so many questions now.

26 June at 4:55 | Open on mastodon.social
Kelly Lepo

Goodbye #AAS244 and #MadisonWI.
I had fun and learned a lot. I also ate a lot of cheese.
See you all at #AAS245!

Statue of the University of Wisconsin–Madison badger mascot, in front of lake Mendota at sunset. There is a line of patchy clouds in the sky.
14 June at 13:05 | Open on astrodon.social
Daniel Pomarède

@kellylepo Thanks a lot Kelly for your coverage of the conference, that was most interesting and useful!

14 June at 13:25 | Open on mastodon.social
Alexey Skobkin
Kelly Lepo

For #caturday, a short film about this ginger gentleman cat who was hanging out outside my hotel in New Orleans.

Danger? No, pets!

He let me pet him until a large group of people passed by and scared him off.

13 January at 15:40 | Open on astrodon.social
Kelly Lepo

Heading off to the American Astronomical Society meeting #AAS243 in New Orleans, the biggest astronomy conference of the year.

[Feel free to mute me or the hashtag for the next week if you don't want updates]

Selfie of me sitting in an airplane seat. You can see two airplane tails out the window. I'm wearing a back hoodie, a white N95 mask, and my long brown hair is in braids.
5 January at 21:46 | Open on astrodon.social
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Thibault MollemanπŸ‡§πŸ‡ͺ 🌈🐝

@kellylepo (thank you for wearing a mask, def on a plane!)

5 January at 21:49 | Open on en.osm.town
DELETED

@kellylepo I was just talking about New Orleans to someone else earlier today - I really wish I could go there again.
Have a po boy and some bourbon for me 😊

5 January at 21:54 | Open on toot.wales
LyleDAL

@kellylepo Have fun, and bring on the astro-toots!

5 January at 22:03 | Open on universeodon.com
Kelly Lepo

Happy Halloween πŸŽƒ

Here are the pumpkins I carved this year: An active red dwarf star and its gas giant planet. I call it an exo-pumpkin.

#pumpkin #JackOLantern #halloween #Astrodon #astronomy

Two carved pumpkins, lit from within, photographed at night. The larger pumpkin is carved with a detailed, stylized image of the sun including prominences that arc off the limb of the sun. The smaller pumpkin is carved like a planet, resembling a stylized Jupiter.
31 Oct 2023 at 15:19 | Open on astrodon.social
Kelly Lepo

Did you know that JPL has a whole gallery of beautifully illustrated Halloween posters, based on real science? Perfect to print and decorate your space, use as a wallpaper on your computer or phone, or as a Zoom background.

exoplanets.nasa.gov/alien-worl

An illustrated poster, in the style of a horror movie: A scarlet star looms behind the ruins of an exoplanet that resembles the shape of a skull. A red galaxy arm is visible in the background. Title: MACS 2129-1 stars in: Galactic Graveyard. Subtitle: Beware: It's old, red and dead! Smaller text: This chillingly haunted galaxy mysteriously stopped making stars only a few billion years after the Big Bang! It became a cosmic cemetery, illuminated by the red glow of decaying stars. Dare to enter, and you might encounter the frightening corpses of exoplanets or the final death throws of once-mighty stars. A Hubble Space Telescope Observation. Based on Real Science.
Illustrated poster, in the style of a horror movie poster. Two astronauts are standing on an asteroid, watching a pair of neutron stars, or the cores of collapsed stars, collide in the distance. The result of the collision is bright, concentrated beams of light called gamma rays. The gamma ray bursts narrowly miss the astronauts as they shoot outward from the collision. Title: A Radiating Thriller of Cosmic Proportions. Gamma Ray Ghouls. Smaller text: In the depths of the Universe the cores of two collapsed stars violently merge to release a burst of the deadliest and most powerful form of light, known as Gamma Rays. These beams of doom are unleashed upon their unfortunate surroundings, shining a million trillion times brighter than the Sun for up to 30 terrifying seconds. No spaceship will shield you from the blinding destruction of the Gamm Ray Ghouls! Based on Real Science. Presented by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray space telescope.
5 Oct 2023 at 21:13 | Open on astrodon.social
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Kelly Lepo

Ever wonder how #JWST images go from raw telescope data to the beautiful press release images you see on social media?

Check out this video series from @spacetelescope. I was on the team that put these together.

In this first video, we show you what the raw data looks like and how you can download it yourself.

Learn more about the process here: webbtelescope.org/contents/art

7 Jul 2023 at 20:49 | Open on astrodon.social
Kelly Lepo

The second video about how #JWST images are made goes into the first steps of image processing: downloading the data, stretching it, and removing artifacts introduced by the telescope.

7 Jul 2023 at 20:56 | Open on astrodon.social
Kelly Lepo

Babe, wake up, a new #JWST image just dropped.

Light from the protostar L1527 escapes above and below an edge-on protoplanetary disk (the dark line at the center of the image), creating an hourglass shape. This illuminates the cavities carved as ejected material from the star collides with the surrounding, dusty nebula.

Dust scatters shorter wavelengths of light, so blue areas are where the dust is thinner and orange areas are where the dust is more dense.

webbtelescope.org/contents/new

#astronomy

Babe, wake up, a new #JWST image just dropped.

Light from the protostar L1527 escapes above and below an edge-on protoplanetary disk (the dark line at the center of the image), creating an hourglass shape. This illuminates the cavities carved as ejected material from the star collides with the surrounding, dusty nebula.

A forming protostar surrounded by a large hourglass-shaped nebula. A bright orange object, the protostar, lies at the center of this image. In front of the protostar is a thin grey line, which is the protostar’s accretion disk. Above the protostar is an orange, triangular cloud of gas that points to the top left of the image. The area closest to the protostar is a brighter orange than the area to the top left, and has more pronounced plumes of orange gas. Below the protostar is another triangular cloud of gas that points to the bottom right of the image. The area closest to the protostar is a blend of pronounced blue and orange plumes of gas. Farther toward the bottom right, the color of the gas turns primarily blue. Stars and galaxies of many different shapes and sizes are scattered around the image, although they are noticeably more absent on the left side of the hourglass.
16 Nov 2022 at 16:22 | Open on astrodon.social
Kelly Lepo

Here is a diagram that shows the scale of this system and the flow of material. 1 au = the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

Gas falls from the nebula onto the disk surrounding the forming star, before being pulled into the star itself. The protostar and the disk also work together to eject material, which carves a cavity above and below the disk.

Credit: Tobin et al. 2012
arxiv.org/abs/1212.0861

Diagram depicting the flow of gas around a protostar. A green circle with a diameter of approximately 25,000 A U, labeled β€œinfalling envelope”, has a star at its center. Arrows inside the envelope point toward the star. The star has a faired disk, which has a diameter about one-third that of the green circle. A scale bar shows the disk has a diameter of about 300 A U. The left side of the disk is red and the right side of the disk is blue. Above and below the disk are U-shaped cutouts of the green circle. Inside the cutout, arrows labeled β€œoutflow” point up and down.
16 Nov 2022 at 17:09 | Open on astrodon.social
Kelly Lepo

The most frequently asked question that I get about #JWST images is: "Why do the stars look like that?". In other words: why are the stars "spikey"?

The answer has to do with both the wave nature of light, the shape of the telescope's primary mirror, and the position of the struts that hold up the secondary mirror.

The full infographic on JWST diffraction spikes can be downloaded here: webbtelescope.org/contents/med

(1/7)

#thread #astrodon #astronomy

At the bottom left of this vertical image are the thickest regions of brown and rusty red gas and dust. There are many layers of semi-transparent gas and dust overlaying one another. A peak rises about a third of the way from the bottom, and becomes far darker brown with two bright red areas toward the tip. The light brown dust becomes more diaphanous about halfway up the screen. There’s a slight gap in the dust, which allows the blue background to come into view clearly. About 60% of the background in this image is set in shades of blue and littered with tiny yellow and blue stars. The brown pillars continue, taking the shape of a shoulder at the base, with three prominent columns rising out toward the upper right. The top left pillar is the largest and widest. The peaks of the second and third pillars are set off in darker shades of brown and have red outlines.
8 Nov 2022 at 19:23 | Open on astrodon.social
Kelly Lepo

The unique spikes around the bright stars in your favorite space images are known as diffraction spikes. For most reflecting telescopes, including JWST, diffraction spikes appear when light interacts with the primary mirror and struts that support the secondary mirror. While all stars can create these patterns, we only see spikes with the brightest stars (or point-like objects) when a telescope takes an image. (2/7)

Webb’s Diffraction Spikes: What Are Diffraction Spikes? The top right of the image shows three stars producing eight-pronged diffraction spike patterns. Below this is an image of Webb’s observing side, including its 18 gold hexagonal-segmented primary mirror, struts, and secondary mirror. The smaller secondary mirror is held in front of the primary mirror by three struts. One strut comes from the top of the mirror and two come from the bottom of the mirror. A face-on view shows the portion of the primary mirror blocked by the struts, as well as the hexagonal hole in the center of the primary mirror.
8 Nov 2022 at 19:25 | Open on astrodon.social
Kelly Lepo

Hello #Astrodon!

I guess it's time for an #introduction. I'm an outreach scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (yes, that is a real job, and yes it is mostly awesome).

I get to talk about all of the cool science coming out of #JWST and lead the Subject Matter Expert engagement project for NASA's Universe of Learning.

I'm mostly here to learn about the cool stuff you all are doing, so I don't have to read the arXiv myself.

4 Nov 2022 at 21:58 | Open on astrodon.social
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Chris Lastovicka
Fred Carlos

@kellylepo I must say a big thanks to Baba Alabi for helping me get my dream job after so much trial. It’s a dream come through for me. I would be selfish to be keep it to myself. You can contact him and get solutions to your problems. He’s a highly spiritual. He has solutions to all life problems. Financial breakthrough, getting your ex back, getting your job, authority, fame. Contact him babaodalabi@gmail.com

5 Nov 2022 at 0:48 | Open on mastodon.online
Fred Carlos
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