Here's something very different from my usual work. The other night a discussion at APOD got me looking at the WISE archive and realized there is actually a lot of cool things to be found in there. If you're looking for the cone and having a hard time, don't blame yourself. This is a widefield image and north is rotated 90° clockwise. The cone itself is located in the upper left quadrant just to the left of that bright reddish star.
If you are familiar with this part of the sky then this probably looks quite foreign to you. You might even remember there is a bright star called HD 47887 just above the Cone in visible light images. That star and the bright reddish star in this image are not the same stars. In fact, this bright one is totally hidden from view in visible light but WISE reveals it as one of the strikingly bright stars of this image. There's also an interesting red glow surrounded by another dusty structure in the lower right corner but I'm not sure what's going on there.
These data are from WISE's four color cryo stage and all four bands are included. Redder colors (22 microns) are longer wavelengths and bluer are shorter (3.4 microns). As you can see, many of the stars are visible in shorter wavelengths and the dust glows brightly at longer ones which gives the image its strange colors but typical for WISE imagery.
It wasn't exactly the easiest to job to mosaic together the five required panels for this image. Alignment is not such an issue but between the panels are some major differences in brightness and I'm not sure what the cause is. Whatever the case, keep that in mind if you notice the slight color differences in the background. Some of it may be due to this.
Red: W4 (22 μm)
Yellow-Green: W3 (12 μm)
Cyan: W2 (4.6 μm)
Violet: W1 (3.4 μm)
North is NOT up. It is 90° clockwise from up.
Tags: infrared WISE NASA Cone nebula dust invisible crazy stuff
A closer view of the Cone Nebula proper. This time north is up and the Cone can be found by seeking the bright, spiky, red star below center and looking just below it. The Cone doesn't stand out nearly as famously in infrared light. It actually blends in quite well with its surroundings.
For more information on colors and processing, please view the widefield image here: www.flickr.com/photos/geckzilla/15943518692/
Tags: WISE NASA infrared Cone Nebula dust
Ah, it is finally done! This one took a few days. Here are the lovely Pleiades and their associated filaments and clumps of dust. To their south is a diffuse warm glow known as the zodiacal light. I am very impressed by how bright it is in this picture and the dynamic range with which it presents. In visible light, it's often barely discernible if you can even find skies dark enough to view it. It's bright enough in infrared to pose a bit of a nuisance to astronomers, but in this case I think it is wonderful.
If you are familiar with WISE, you know it's an infrared observatory, and this image may not look anything like what you might expect from it. WISE image releases typically look like this. While useful, they're not particularly pretty, and they might have even turned off a lot of people from infrared imagery. I've definitely seen a general lack of interest in infrared imagery and have even seen more than a few people express displeasure about JWST being an infrared telescope, fearing all the images will be... well, ugly.
Worry not, fellow humans! JWST will produce beautiful images and they need not be presented in weirdo colors. This particular image has only one special processing trick beyond what I normally do. After some careful consideration I decided to reverse the wavelength order. I nearly always put the shortest wavelength in the blue channel and the longest in the red. This time, I did the opposite. I was afraid that cognitive bias would prevent people from enjoying this image if it was a fiery red, given the extreme familiarity the astronomy community has with the Pleiades. Sometimes you've got to do something unconventional to get the result you want.
Processing notes: Thankfully, most of the processing work was aligning and matching up each of the frames to one another. This is fairly tedious work, but it's not nearly as bad as dealing with cosmic rays. There were a few annuluses to deal with near some of the brighter stars, but they only took about 15 minutes to be rid of. I did not saturate the colors or apply any sort of sharpening.
Red: W1 (3.4 μm)
Yellow-Green: W2 (4.6 μm)
Cyan: W3 (12 μm)
Blue: W4 (22 μm)
North is up.
Tags: WISE Pleiades warm dust reflection nebula open cluster stars infrared desktop wallpaper
This is what the infrared Pleiades look like with a normal wavelength arrangement. Wasn't going to post it, but after asking around I found out that it's split maybe 50/50 on preference. Enjoy! More info at: WISE Pleiades
Red: W4 (22 μm)
Yellow-Green: W3 (12 μm)
Cyan: W2 (4.6 μm)
Blue: W1 (3.4 μm)
North is up.
Tags: WISE Pleiades warm dust reflection nebula open cluster stars infrared desktop wallpaper
More infrared astronomy from WISE. Once again, I've reversed the wavelength order for what I consider a more aesthetically pleasing result, so keep in mind that deep blue is the longer wavelength and red is the shorter wavelength.
The Pacman Nebula, otherwise known as NGC 281, is revealed not as a singular pool of light but as a larger structure of seemingly related knots and trails of dust. Pacman itself is the largest blue structure northeast of center. The two other noticeable structures do not have any special designations.
In the lower right corner of the image is a blueish strand of stars I included because it seemed interesting. Deep blue in this case corresponds to the warm dust in the 22 micron channel. In visible light, a knot of dark, obscuring dust is visible in the location of the strand, but no stars are. If I had to guess I would say they stars in the process of forming. They just happen to be in a line like this instead of clustered into more of a blob. I couldn't find any literature on this particular structure, but star forming regions are ubiquitous throughout the Milky Way. What does seem unusual is their isolation and apparently long, linear shape. I haven't spent nearly enough time studying infrared imagery to say whether it is common or uncommon, though. Is this what a stellar nursery looks like before they begin to blow away their natal dust cloud?
I tried very hard to balance the colors this time and not have the blue and red overwhelm the image, so more cyan is showing through this time, unlike with the Pleiades image. Nine WISE frames were aligned and matched to create a smooth mosaic. Some small optical artifacts were removed. No sharpening or color saturation was done.
Red: W1 (3.4 μm)
Yellow-Green: W2 (4.6 μm)
Cyan: W3 (12 μm)
Blue: W4 (22 μm)
North is up.
Tags: Pacman nebula NGC281 WISE infrared space astronomy stars cluster dust young stellar objects