A short animation of comet ATLAS breaking up, as observed by the Hubble Space Telescope. I cleaned up all the cosmic rays and artifacts for your viewing delight. It repeats several times since only 5 frames without a loop option would be very short indeed. In the upper right corner is a background star which is streaked because the comet moves against the background sky rather quickly.

Five observations spanning 36 minutes were used to make this animation. The proposal can be found here:
Breakup of Long-Period Comet C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS)

All channels: WFC3/UVIS F350LP

North is up.

Tags:   comet ATLAS HST Hubble breakup breaking up C/2019 Y4

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A supernova explosion that happened in Centaurus A. This animation represents about 1.5 years of time, omitting the first frame which is a legacy image from 2010. This all happened a bit more than one month after the initial explosion. What you see here is the fading of the supernova, and then the blueish ring that is a light echo that began to propagate outwards immediately after the initial explosion. Upon closer inspection, a second, fainter light echo seems to appear following the first in the last two frames.

Some processing notes: The telescope never oriented the same way twice when taking observations, resulting in diffraction spikes and the whole PSF of the foreground star being incredibly distracting. I stabilized this quite a bit by both using a stacked median version of the datasets to remove the spikes completely, and then added the 2010 spikes back on to all the frames. Red channel data were missing from the 3rd and 4th frames (second and third brightest images of the fading supernova) so color for that is both guessed and pulled from the 2010 data. I did use a fair amount of clarity and texture filtering from Camera Raw.

Data from the following proposals were used to create this image:
Star Formation in Nearby Galaxies
Light Echoes and the Progenitor of SN 2016adj in Cen A
Light Echoes and the Environments of SNe 2014J and 2016adj

Red: WFC3/UVIS F814W
Green: WFC3/UVIS F547M
Blue: WFC3/UVIS F438W

North is up.

Tags:   HST Hubble supernova explosion light echo SN2016ADJ SN 2016ADJ visible dust galaxy Cen A Centaurus A

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Presented here is an animation of the supernova remnant SNR J0509.5-6731 expanding over time. It appears to be moving at close to 2% of the speed of light. It is around 163000 light years distant, so it has to move quite speedily for us to be able to witness its movement on a human timescale. The first frame is from 2006, and the second is from 2016. The video shows the two frames blinking back and forth to make the motion easy to see.

Note that only the narrowband (seen here as the red, smooth outline of the nebula) was available to show the nebula's expansion. The star field is essentially a static image, though the narrowband data did also capture some star movement, particularly the bright star to the left of the frame. The Chandra data was simply scaled up to match with the expansion of the shell in the Hubble data.

A still image is available here: flic.kr/p/2heTvq9

Flickr shrank this video down, so you may prefer a larger version at Youtube:
youtu.be/YZUJysgK6Us

Hubble proposals used:
The Proper Motion of Supernova Remnant E0509-67.5
Single-Degenerate or Double-Degenerate? The Case for a Third Epoch Observation of the Confirmed Ia Supernova Remnant 0509-67.5
A Search for Surviving Companions of Type Ia Supernovae in the Large Magellanic Cloud
Hubble Heritage 2.0

Chandra data:
Red: .10-.70 keV
Green: .70-1.0 keV
Blue: 1.00-5.00 keV
(Obs IDs 776, 7635, 8554)

Hubble data:
Red screen: ACS/WFC F658N
Red: WFC3/UVIS F814W
Green: WFC3/UVIS F555W
Blue: WFC3/UVIS F475W

North is up.

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Showing how to make a globular cluster in Blender. Particles emit from a single vertex and are dispersed with Brownian motion. Once the animation reaches the desired appearance, new keyframes are added to instantly increase damping to 1 and decrease Brownian to 0. The camera then revolves around the finished cluster. I think some of the blinking is probably caused by a few places were particles intersect momentarily.

The star texture is generated by TinyTim, a Hubble point spread function simulator.

Tags:   3d Blender globular cluster

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This is a 3d rendering of Jupiter using OPAL data mapped to a Jupiter-shaped spheroid. I was careful to map the cloud bands accurately to the correct latitude. I also tried to replicate some of the effects of peering at Jupiter through the Hubble telescope by using a few shader hacks in Blender. The result appears fairly realistic.

We are looking at Jupiter at an inclination of -3°, so if you feel that you can see a little more of the southern pole than the northern, that is why. I don't know the exact inclination with respect to HST at the time, but when I matched it to single exposure observations, somewhere around 2-4° seemed about right. The phase angle was 1° at the time so solar illumination is almost straight on.

This animation represents Jupiter as it appeared around 2017 April.

A link to the OPAL maps is here:
archive.stsci.edu/prepds/opal/

Red: WFC3/UVIS F631N
Green: WFC3/UVIS F502N
Blue: WFC3/UVIS 395N

North is not up, but Jupiter's north pole is.

Tags:   Hubble HST Jupiter animation 3d Blender rotation OPAL

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