Readers’ wildlife photos

Today we have a mixture of animals and astronomy. The readers’ captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

The first three photos are from reader Terry Platt.

The weather hasn’t been helpful recently, but here are some H-alpha images of other objects in the Cygnus region. The NGC7000 image shows an impressive ‘wall’ of hot hydrogen with dark dust clouds. This region is part of the ‘North America’ nebula, which is a very large area of hydrogen emission to the northeast of the bright star Deneb. The nebula overall is vaguely similar to the shape of the USA and this part is ‘California and New Mexico’. It is about 2590 light years from Earth.

The other two images are of the planetary nebula M27. One is processed to show a ‘visual’ appearance, as the eye might see, while the other is very strongly contrast boosted to show the extensive, but faint, outer extensions. Planetary nebulae are the remnants of Sun-like stars, which have exhausted their hydrogen and blown most of their outer layers into the surrounding space. This process begins with ‘helium flashes’ where the helium rich star detonates helium burning for short periods and blows away its outer layers – this is the source of the faint extensions. As the star ages further, the process becomes more continuous and the core of the star is finally exposed as a very hot, but tiny, ‘white dwarf’ . M27 is at this stage and the white dwarf core can be faintly seen at its centre – the Sun may look something like this in about 10 billion years from now. M27 is about 1350 light years away in the constellation of Vulpecula.

Visual image:

Contrast boosted:

And two arthropods by Tony Eales:

More proof, if needed, that jumping spiders are the cats of the arachnid order. A study was published showing sleeping jumping spiders twitch in their sleep and even show what looks like REM periods associated with these twitches. Spider dreams? [JAC: Photos are Tony’s]