Montage Mosaics The Pillars Of Creation!
From the post:
The Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula (M16) remain one of the iconic images of the Hubble Space Telescope. Three pillars rise from a molecular cloud into an enormous HII region, powered by the massive young cluster NGC 6611. Such pillars are common in regions of massive star formation, where they form as a result of ionization and stellar winds.
In a paper that will shortly be published in MNRAS, entitled “The Pillars of Creation revisited with MUSE: gas kinematics and high-mass stellar feedback traced by optical spectroscopy,” McLeod et al (2015) analyze of new data acquired with the Multi Unit Spectroscopy Explorer (MUSE) instrument on the VLT. They used Montage to create integrated line maps of the single pointings obtained at the telescope. The figure below shows an example of these maps:
The images were too spectacular to pass without reposting.
Also a reminder that “national security” posturing has all the significance of a peacock spreading its feathers. Of interest to other peacocks, possibly female ones, not of much interest to anyone else.
It’s too bad that Hieronymus Bosch isn’t still around. I can easily imagine him painting “The Garden of Paranoid Delights,” for the security establishment.