Zooniverse

As I have competed about ten hours of work on the Zooniverse website, I have become much better at recognizing "bubbles", galaxies, dark nebulae, star clusters, and green knots within the pictures of the Milky Way gathered from the telescopes. It is interesting to see the differences between pictures of different parts of the universe; some pictures are merely black with stars scattered about, whereas some photos are full of bubbles with green knots and bright red objects within them.

APOD 4.5- The Antennae

Nearly 60 million light-years away in the constellation of Corvus, molecular clouds of two galaxies are colliding and causing mass star formation to occur. Although the clouds of dust are colliding together, NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, the stars within the galaxies, are not colliding. This process of collision will take hundreds of millions of years for the galaxies completely move together. The two galaxies span about 500 thousand light-years across and parts of dust and stellar material expands out even further from the collision as it has been moved by gravitational tidal forces. As the trails of dust material is left behind, it form what appears to be the antennae of the galaxies.

APOD 4.4- The Cat's Eye Nebula

The Cat's Eye Nebula, NGC6543, is three thousand light-year's from Earth and is over half a light year across. It is a planetary nebula, an emission nebula that consists of a shell that glows with ionized gas that has been ejected late in the star's life. The star  of the Cat's Eye Nebula is very similar to the sun. The shells surrounding the nebula are outer layers being ejected in regular convulsions. The sun could have a death similar to this one in about 5 billion years. The inner structures of the nebula and their formations are not understood by scientists. Much research has been conducted with pictures being taken by the Hubble telescope such as this one.

APOD 4.3- Young Stars in the Rho Ohpiuchi Cloud

Rho Ophiuchi is located near the constellation of Ohpiuchus about 400 light-years away. In this area, there is one of the closet star forming regions. Young stars in the cloud radiate with infrared wavelengths because they heat the surrounding dusts in the cloud complex. Most of these stars are just 300,000 years old, fairly new in terms of stars. The cloud consists of cold molecular hydrogen gas from the newly forming stars.The nebula appears pink and blue in the image from WISE, however these stars are not visible in optical telescopes. The red region is encompassing the star Sigma Scorpii. It appears red because of reflected light from the stars. Newly formed, glowing stars are shown as bright pink dots behind the dust cloud in the photograph.

Zooniverse-The Milky Way Project

On the Zooniverse website, I have been working in the Milky Way Project. In this project I classified Green Knots, Red Fuzzy Objects, Star Clusters, and Dark Nebulae. The goal is to find and identify 'Bubbles' and other interesting objects in the Universe and submitting the images in hopes of finding undiscovered objects in space. I have put approximately five hours into the project so far.

APOD 4.2-The Milky Way Over Tenerife

This amazing image of the Milky Way Galaxy band in the sky over Tenerife is actually a compilation of several enhanced photographs of the panorama. The half-circle shaped band is the disk of the Milky Way's spiral galaxy. Earth is inside of the spiral disk, so the band appears in a circle around the planet. The red tinted ring underneath the band of stars in Barnard's Loop. Inside of the arch, the waxing moon can be seen along with opens star cluster, the Pleiades. The photo also shows the Spring and Winter constellations of Vela, Puppis, Canis Minor and Major, Hydra, Perseus, Auriga, Orion, and Casseopia.