A friend at work showed me these Valentine’s Day images from NASA’s Instagram page today and I couldn’t help but sharing. After all, this is my stars blog, right?
These photos are so fun and beautiful. It’s amazing how we can see love all around us, sometimes on purpose, sometimes on accident, sometimes in nature, and sometimes written in the stars or on another planet. It’s everywhere!
Enjoy! The captions are from the Instagram page as well.
#NASALove from the Red Planet: Mars is red, so don’t be blue. Hearts abound from us to you! From the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) team, this collection of images acquired over 3 Mars years shows some of the heart-shaped features found on Mars by the team.
Happy Valentine’s Day! Here’s #NASALove to celebrate – like this cosmic rose from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Spitzer captured in 2004 with its infrared eyes a pink and green rose-like picture of a cluster of newborn stars known as a nebula. “The picture is more than just pretty,” said Dr. Thomas Megeath, principal investigator for the latest observations and an astronomer at the HarvardSmithsonianCenter for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass. “It helps us understand how stars form in the crowded environments of stellar nurseries.” Located 3,330 light-years away in the constellation Cepheus and spanning 10 light-years across, the rosebud-shaped nebula, numbered NGC 7129, is home to some 130 young stars. Our own Sun is believed to have grown up in a similar family setting.
A Valentine’s Day Mystery! Our Chandra Observatory sees a heart in the darkness – This young star cluster NGC 346 highlights a heart-shaped cloud of 8 million-degree Celsius gas in the central region. Evidence from radio, optical and ultraviolet telescopes suggests that the hot cloud, which is about 100 light years across, is the remnant of a supernova explosion that occurred thousands of years ago.