Lately, I've been going to Costco and blowing up some of the hi-res NASA/ESA/ESO photos that you can get so easily on their websites. ($6 Poster Print 16"x20", so cheap! Try to avoid FedEx or Kinkos) With the incredible definition available in these photos, a 16"x20" looks downright amazing. I'd like to try a bigger frame sometime soon. This is a photo of the Cat's Eye Nebula that I printed and cropped for a 15"x15" frame, seen here hanging on my wall:
So far as terrestrial views of the heavens, this site I found has intensely blown me away. One of these I will frame, I swear to you now.
http://www.technology.am/29-
I'm seriously considering printing out this brand new image below. Perhaps as a 16"X"20, but instead of cropped, easily edited. (this image is square, as you can see) In order to fit a non square frame just apply black in the background of a digital canvas in your preferred dimensions. IMPORTANT: True black (default black) may not be the exact shade at the border of one of these pictures. Use the "eyedrop" tool to grab the exact shade of black from the edge of these photos. These workarounds are wildly convenient. Thanks, Space, for being black!
For imaging editing, there is a free photoshop clone, open source and legal, called GIMP. It's completely appropriate, don't mind the acronym. It stands for the GNU Image Manipulation Program. I've used it for the past decade, it's wonderful. Feel free to try it out here.
Hubble Sees Red Giant Blow a Bubble
This image is full res. (click, then right click>save as)
This description of this new image is straight off of NASA's site. The wording is too perfect, so since it's public domain, here's a copy-paste.
Camelopardalis, or U Cam for short, is a star nearing the end of its life. As stars run low on fuel, they become unstable. Every few thousand years, U Cam coughs out a nearly spherical shell of gas as a layer of helium around its core begins to fuse. The gas ejected in the star’s latest eruption is clearly visible in this picture as a faint bubble of gas surrounding the star.
U Cam is an example of a carbon star, a rare type of star with an atmosphere that contains more carbon than oxygen. Due to its low surface gravity, typically as much as half of the total mass of a carbon star may be lost by way of powerful stellar winds. Located in the constellation of Camelopardalis (The Giraffe), near the North Celestial Pole, U Cam itself is much smaller than it appears in this Hubble image. In fact, the star would easily fit within a single pixel at the center of the image. Its brightness, however, is enough to saturate the camera's receptors, making the star look much larger than it is.
The shell of gas, which is both much larger and much fainter than its parent star, is visible in intricate detail in Hubble’s portrait. This phenomenon is often quite irregular and unstable, but the shell of gas expelled from U Cam is almost perfectly spherical.
Image Credit: ESA/NASA
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