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UC San Diego Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics

The Crescent Nebula (NGC 6888)

This cosmic brain-looking object is a broadband image of a star that is slowly dying.

At its center is WR 136, a Wolf–Rayet star shedding layers of material through violent stellar winds traveling at thousands of kilometers per second. These winds crash into the slower materials that were expelled during an earlier stage of the star’s evolution, creating the glowing, filamentary brainy shell we see here.

In X-rays, observations from space telescope like XMM-Newton have revealed the million-degree plasma within the interior that’s heated by shocks where the stellar winds interact with surrounding gas. Research combining X-ray observations with hydrodynamic models is helping astronomers understand how massive stars inject energy and chemically enriched material into the interstellar medium.

I captured this image using the Pad 70 observatory managed by the @sdastronomyassociation.

#astronomy #astrophysics #nasa #telescope #photography @skyandtelescopemag @astronomy.magazine @ucsdastro

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🌟Congratulations, Professor Pat Diamond!💎👏

Distinguished Professor Pat Diamond has been named the recipient of the American Physical Society’s 2026 James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of plasma physics.

Pat Diamond was selected for "theoretical contributions to the statistical dynamics and self-organization in plasmas, especially experimentally confirmed predictions of predator-prey interactions between turbulence and emergent zonal flows near the LH transition and the ExB staircase in confined magnetized plasmas."

#physicsdepartment #plasmaphysics

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💯💯💯💯💯
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hair perm done by
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#hair #curls #curlyhair #happyday #lifestyle

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$The Iris Nebula (NGC 7023) These towering cosmic clouds are brewing nearly 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus, forming the beautiful and dramatic Iris nebula. The Iris nebula is a reflection nebula where the central bright blue binary star system (HD 200775) with magnitude +7.4 illuminates the surrounding dust, giving the appearance of the bright blue eye of this churning celestial storm. This nebula is a famous laboratory for Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs); These are large carbon-rich molecules that produce prominent infrared emissions when UV light particles excite them. PAHs offer a very interesting window into how simple cosmic chemistry evolves toward the organic building blocks found in planets and potentially life! If you’d like to learn more about PAHs, explore the work of @ucsdastro Professor Karin Sandstrom, who conducts cutting-edge research on these molecules and has published extensively on the subject. This image was captured using the @sdastronomyassociation PAD 70 observatory over three nights and 14.6 hours of exposure. This 6” Astro-Physics refractor at its native focal length is paired with an ASI6300MC OSC camera. #astronomy #telescope #astrophotography #photography #deepsky @nasa @skyandtelescopemag @astrobin_com @astronomy.magazine$

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Another incredible night at the observatory 🔭

Always so grateful to be apart of the docent program here at @palomarobservatory, and thank you to @fleetscience for stargazing with us!

It was also such an honor listening to Floor Broekgaarden share her work with Gravitational Wave Paleontology Lab. If you want to see some incredible solar research or get in involved, please check them out ☀️

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$The Tulip Nebula SH2-101, the Tulip Nebula, is a stunning and colorful star forming region in Cygnus X. The shape of the Tulip is being formed by radiation pressure, photoionization, and stellar winds excavating the dark cavities and compressing the surrounding gas. Hiding within this dense stellar garden is a creature of destruction: Cygnus X-1 is a stellar-mass black hole that forms a bright OIII bow shock as the high energy radiation ejected from the black hole’s intense gravitational and magnetic fields collide with the surrounding gas. Since this image is broadband, the bow shock region is very faint, even with nearly 15 hours of exposure. In my research at @ucsdastro in gamma-ray astrophysics, Cygnus X-1 is very bright in MeV gamma-rays. Studying the spectra of Cyg X-1 has helped astrophysicists understand more about black hole physics and the astrophysics of the surrounding regions. Cyg X-1 was one of the very first convincing stellar-mass black hole candidates. Since the 70’s we’ve now identified about 30 stellar-mass black holes and we expect that we have only discovered less than one millionth of the population that we think is actually out there. I captured this image using a lease on the @sdastronomyassociation PAD 70 observatory. This amazing remote observatory houses a 6” Astronaut-Physics AP115 refractor and an ASI6200MC astronomy camera. This image is broadband RGB with about 15 hrs of exposure. #photography #astronomy #astrophotography #deepsky #telescope @astrobin_com @skyandtelescopemag @nasa @astronomy.magazine @universetoday @apod.nasa @zwoastro @zwoasi @zwo_astronomy_cameras$

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