Seen in a false-coloured infra-red image on Astronomy Picture of the Day for 2/2/20 this shows the bow wave of runaway star Zeta Oph (centre, blue) travelling at 24 kilometres a second after its more massive companion star exploded and blew it out of the system.

Zeta Oph is 460 light years away and 65,000 times brighter than the Sun. Its true luminosity is obscured by dust though.

A Goldilocks Zone is the volume around a star in which a planet habitable by humans could exist. This volume is different for different types of star. Astronomy Picture of the Day for 31/1/20 had the graphic below showing such zones for three types of star but also their likely X-ray irradiation, relative abundance in the Milky Way and longevity.

Our sun is in the bottom category in the graphic, least long-lived, least abundant, but also with least irradiation.

The solar wind is of course not actually a sound wave but a stream of particles blown out from the Sun. However NASA’s solar probe has enabled scientists to translate the particles’ impacts and other data into sound. (The video feed is from Parker’s sideways viewing camera; if it pointed forward the Sun’s glare would destroy it.)

From You Tube via Astronomy Picture of the Day for 21/1/20.

From Astronomy Picture of the Day for 19/12/19.

Apollo 17’s lunar module Challenger’s ascent stage.

Despite all the irregular angles these spacecraft had a kind of beauty.

Apollo 17’s mission commander Gene Cernan can be seen through the triangular window. This was the last mission to land men on the Moon.

47 years ago.

This is mind-boggling.

Okay, it’s not a real image in the sense that it’s not anything human eyes could actually see for themselves.

From Astronomy Picture of the Day for 18/12/19, this is a map of the surface of a neutron star generated from X-ray data.

This star spins once round every 0.0049 seconds! It’s 1,000 light years away. That’s going on for 6,000 million million miles distant.

Yet humans have managed to map its surface.

This is from Astronomy Picture of the Day for 16/12/19.

Galaxy M 77’s magnetic fields as revealed by polarised infra-red light superimposed over X-ray emissions and visible light. The fields do seem to take the same lines as the galaxy’s spiral arms:-

From Astronomy Picture of the Day for 27/11/19.

This is Hoag’s Object, in a newly reprocessed picture from the Hubble Space Telescope. How this unusual structure formed is something of a mystery. Remarkably within the dark part of the ring you can see another ring galaxy:-

As seen in Astronomy Picture of the Day for 20/11/19.

Three galaxies colliding. The overall system is designated ARP 273.

From Astronomy Picture of the Day for 6/11/19.

The Pinwheel Galaxy is more properly designated M101.

Here it is seen in an amalgamation of colour-coded photos taken in X-ray (purple,) ultra-violet (blue,) visible light (yellow) and infra-red (red) from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope respectively.

Given it looks like a spinning Catherine wheel firework they should have posted this a day earlier.

Then again, they’re USian, they probably wouldn’t know the significance of the 5 November in the UK.

Another one for Halloween. Again from Astronomy Picture of the Day this time from 25/10/19.

The “Ghosts” of Cassiopeia. Which overall does look like some sort of bird of prey:-

(The photo is copyright to Tomasso Stella so I won’t infringe it by reproducing it here.)