NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft recently sent greetings from space. They sent fascinating images of a star birth region, and Saturn, the ringed wonder.

 

Celebrating the new season, the Hubble Heritage Project team released a new awesome Hubble picture. The picture shows the star birth region LH 95 in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a nearby satellite galaxy of the Milky Way Galaxy. Low mass, newly-born stars and luminous stellar giants reside in LH 95. The image was taken in March 2006, with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS).

 

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

 

At a distance of approximately 1.7 million km from Saturn, looking on the unlit side of the planet's spectacular rings, which cannot be viewed from Earth, Cassini imaged a crescent Saturn, in natural color. The image is a composite of images taken in red, green and blue spectral filters. Image scale is 97 km per pixel. The image, taken on 4 November 2006, was published on 25 December 2006, as Christmas greetings.

 

Further reading

Hubble Heritage Project

heritage.stsci.edu/commonpages/infoindex/ourproject/moreproject.html

Hubble Heritage Project Gallery

heritage.stsci.edu/gallery/gallery.html

Cassini-Huygens Mission

saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm

 

 

Aymen Mohamed Ibrahem

Senior Astronomy Specialist