Last November I blogged about a jaw-dropping image of the Milky Way by the American photographer Wally Pacholka – see Amazing. He’s developed a stunning way of photographing the night sky that gives a sense of three dimensionality.

According to his website, NASA has now published 34 of Mr Pacholka’s photographs in its Astronomy Picture of the Day series – more than any other photographer.

Today’s APOD – The Milky Way Over Devil’s Tower – is the latest. Devil’s Tower in Wyoming will be familiar to movie goers; it was the scenic backdrop for Stephen Speilberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The Milky Way Over Devil's Tower by Wally Pacholka

A thousand parsecs hence, within our own galaxy and appearing in the constellation of Gemini, a spectacular event is in progress.

The Eskimo Nebula

If mainstream astonomical theory is correct, when we look at the Eskimo Nebula we’re witnessing a late stage in the evolution of a star similar to our own sun. As it turns into a superdense white dwarf, the star ejects large amounts of gaseous matter into the surrounding space. The afterglow fades slowly.

This nebula was first catalogued in the late 18th century by the brilliant musician and astronomer William Herschel. Now, with photos from the Hubble telescope, we can observe it’s ghostly magnificence better than ever before.

Greedy, bellicose idiots, scrapping to snatch unfair portions of the spoils of mortal existence, would do well to bookmark NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website and visit often.

We need to turn swords into ploughshares, missile-launchers into telescopes.

The smaller of the two moons of Mars

This photo of Deimos was featured recently on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website, which says: “Deimos is one of the smallest known moons in the Solar System measuring only about 15 kilometers across. The diminutive Martian moon was discovered in 1877″.

AbsoluteAstronomy.com explains: “In Greek mythology, Deimos was the personification of dread. He was the son of Ares and Aphrodite. He, his brother Phobos and the goddess Enyo accompanied Ares into battle, as well as his father’s attendants, Trembling, Fear, Dread and Panic. His Roman equivalent was Formido or Metus. Asaph Hall (a 19th century American astronomer), who discovered the moons of Mars, named one Deimos, and the other Phobos.”

A recent entry in the Planetary Society website has more:

Deimos is relatively poorly studied because all modern Mars spacecraft orbit at altitudes much lower than Deimos’ 20,000 kilometers. Since Deimos, like nearly every moon in the solar system (including our own), is tidally locked to its planet, that means that all orbiters see only one face of the moon, the “sub-Mars hemisphere,” and that at a great distance. Phobos orbits much closer to Mars (at 9,400 kilometers), which is still above the altitude of the circular, polar orbiters like Mars Global Surveyor, Odyssey, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, but it’s below the apoapsis of Mars Express, and is now being well mapped from all sides.

One indicator of how little attention has been paid to Deimos is the number of place names that have been formally approved for it. Are you ready for the complete map of all named places on Deimos? Here you go…>

As you can see there are only two landmarks at present, named after outstanding European intellects of the 18th century.

Both men, in their own way, put a dent in doom.

The reason they were associated with Deimos, after it’s discovery indicated that Mars had two moons, is even more obscure. Voltaire and Swift both wrote about the two moons of Mars, more than a century before the smaller moon was observed by an astronomer. It’s possible they picked up the idea from Kepler, who believed Mars had two moons because he mistranslated one of Galileo’s anagrams. Sometimes history of science reads stranger than science fiction…

To the point. Who else deserves a crater on Deimos named in their honour?

Who has scored a direct hit on dread and taken a sizeable chunk out of the prospect of Doomsday? Suggestions welcome.

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Other articles in this blog about: [cattagart photography]

Our Galaxy

Two-Armed Spiral Milky Way: a CalTech artist’s illustration of our galaxy, portrayed from a view perpendicular to the galactic spirals.

Our sun is located just to the right above the Persius Arm.