NASA Just Released These Gorgeous X-Ray Photos of Space

[n2doc]

Happy Wednesday space fans, NASA just released for your viewing pleasure eight spectacular photos of the universe never-before seen, taken by the agency’s x-ray space telescope.

NASA published the images this week in honor of the incredibly specific American Archive Month, being celebrated by all manner of archivists this October. For its part, the space agency selected a handful of greatest hits from the massive archive of unprocessed celestial images housed at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

“These images represent the observations of thousands of objects that are permanently available to the world thanks to Chandra’s archive,” NASA wrote in its announcement.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory is one of the NASA's "Great Observatories," alongside the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Chandra’s space-based telescope has been in orbit space since 1999, capturing the cosmos in X-ray vision. By studying X-ray images, which can detect far more detail than any photos of space taken from Earth, scientists have been able to discover unexplored parts of the universe.

The resulting catalog of thousands of images is freely available to astronomers and lay space enthusiasts alike. It's "one of the legacies of the Chandra mission that will serve both the scientific community and the public for decades to come," wrote NASA. They also look really pretty, as you can see.

more
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/nasa-just-released-these-gorgeous-x-ray-photos-of-space

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/xray-universe-legacy.html#.UnErpxb9W4R

[niyad]

1. k and r--and thank you for continuing to bring us such breathtaking images .

[BrotherIvan]

2. Stunning

Keep NASA funded for all of us please. If we decide war is more important, we as a species are doomed.

[CrispyQ]

3. So beautiful!

Kick!