Space Station Science Picture of the Day: Southern Skies

 March 31, 2003



Southern Skies

Credit: Don Pettit, ISS Expedition
6 Science Officer, NASA

Explanation: For a while last month, the International
Space Station (ISS) orbited Earth with its optical-quality
Destiny
Lab window tilted toward the southern sky. ISS Science Officer
and astrophotographer
Don
Pettit couldn’t resist taking this picture of the Milky Way
near the south celestial pole. In the upper right is the Keyhole
Nebula–a distant molecular cloud where young stars are forming.
The Keyhole Nebula also harbors the doomed
star eta
Carina. In the lower left is the Coal
Sack Nebula–an inky-black dust cloud 60 light years wide.
Stars are probably condensing deep inside the Coal Sack–there’s
enough dust and gas there to make 40,000 suns–but their light
has not yet broken through the cloud’s dense exterior. In between
the two lies The Southern Cross, also known as The
Crux. The Southern Cross is such a famous constellation that
it is depicted on the national flags of Australia
and New Zealand.
(Rob Suggs of the Marshall Space Flight Center has prepared a
version of this image with more nebulas and star clusters labeled:
click here.)