bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19381098

Also congratulations to all of you. I think we all together gathered some very nice imagery which is shared with the whole world now.

Judy: it was nice cooperating on asterisk. I really enjoyed it a lot …

Josh: What a great image! I really like it. Nice coincidence that I noticed that you are a teacher too. I’m myself a physics teacher and also give astronomy in high-school. It’s a perfect topic to interest the youth for science I think….

Renaud: That’s a great job you did on mosaicing there… Pitty Hubble doesn’t cover it completely…

There’s that dust again! How did space get so much dust! It looks to me that there is more dust in space than stars and planets!

Well, if you count dust grain by dust grain versus numbers of stars and planets and considering that stars and planets – or at least asteroids and comets *produce* interstellar dust – then, well you’d be counting an awful loo-ong time!

Technically, I guess the thing there’s most of in space is .. space there’s an awful lot of it!
(Stealing that line from a cheesy action movie memory serving.)

Given hydrogen and helium are the most abundant elements I’d guess there’s more gas clouds than anything other than space and maybe quantum foam but I Am Not A Cosmologist or astrochemist so, dunno for sure.

Unless I’m mistaken (which is always possible) the dust tends to accumulate and pile up in certain regions – galaxies largest dustbunnies anyone – hence the nebulae and eventually get incorporated into new stars and worlds. As Carl Sagan famously said : “We are stardust” ourselves just geologically and then biochemically altered over vast spans of time.

Since I have been visiting BA I have been getting more and more curiou
s about this dust and gas floating around than anything else. Is there a science of studying just all this dust? Are there people who study this stuff and nothing else? A “dustronomer ” ?

Since these commonly take the form of dark obscuring dust clouds or dark nebulae maybe “nebulositer” would be the term? Although that would put them under a bit of a cloud!

NGC1763 has been nicknamed the “bean nebula” (see here why: http://spacetelescope.org/images/heic1011a/), but the winner of the contest is of an adjacent region, which appears to be part of nearby NGC1769. Both of which I understand are part of the LHA 120-N 11 complex (along with other ‘objects’ in the NGC catalogue). It’s a rich region of the Large Magellanic Cloud.

- Possibly the primary reason is that the Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for many many years now. Many of the contributions to the contest were stitched up together from different observation programmes years apart, through different generations of instruments (For instance: the M77 picture that finished 2nd uses data from three observation programmes in 1995 & 2003).

- Some contributions were made using data from other observatories (for instance this magnificent contribution by Andre van der Hoeven couldn’t have been processed in colour from HST data alone : http://www.flickr.com/photos/avdhoeven/6987291788/in/photostream).

- Some of the data requires a lot of tricky processing and it may not be so obvious at first glance that something visually interesting and ‘clean’ can be produced. Optical artefacts, cosmic rays, low signal, noise, gaps between cameras and other imperfections are common.

Truth be told though, the people who normally process data from the HST into images for the public have been quite thorough, it has been difficult to find suitable data that hadn’t been already processed and published before on the Hubble sites. A large number of contributions to the contest were in fact very similar to pictures released previously (possibly unbeknown to the contributor, I myself processed data out of contest only to find out once I was done that a nearly identical image had been published on spacetelescope.org).

…And now that this particular image is in the spotlight I am feeling super self-conscious, thinking I could have done it a little better! I better leave it as it is, though. People seem to like it enough.

Congratulations to everyone in the contest. I’m super happy for Andre, too. He gave me a few pointers early on when I was first learning over at Starship Asterisk.