The Orion Nebula, M42, NGC 1976. Copyright Jodie Tighe, all rights reserved. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 36. $825.00 framed.
The first time I looked through a good telescope, I aimed it at the Orion Nebula, about 1,600 light-years away, visible to the naked eye as a fuzzy patch in Orion's sword. The bright cluster in the middle is called the Trapezium, and the average age of its approximately 1,000 stars is about 1 million years - very young in astronomical terms. Active, recent and ongoing star formation is happening in the Trapezium. After a lifetime spent under what to the unaided eye seems a two-dimensional sky, stretched overhead like the domed walls of a thin curving tent, seeing this nebula made me feel as if what I would never have consciously called "the top of the sky" had just come off - and I had fallen up into it.
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V838 Monocerotis,
acrylic on panel, 16 x 20. In private
collection, NFS.
Copyright Jodie Tighe, all rights reserved.
Copyright Jodie Tighe, all rights reserved.
In
January 2002, this variable star, 20,000 light-years away in the constellation
Monoceros, flared to 600,000 times our Sun’s luminosity. It faded again soon,
and astronomers aren't positive what caused its outburst. During the flare,
V838 Monocerotis didn't shed its outermost layers, as most stars would. Instead,
it grew to a huge size, and its surface temperature dropped to about that of a
light bulb. What we see here is a “light echo” from the outburst that
re-illuminates the surrounding dust shells it had shed years before.
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The Whirlpool Galaxy (M51, NGC 5194). NFS
Copyright Jodie Tighe, all rights reserved.
Copyright Jodie Tighe, all rights reserved.
Here’s a close-up of the Whirlpool Galaxy, as if we
were floating over it. About 100,000 light-years across, it lies about 30
million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici. The Whirlpool is
quite near another, smaller galaxy not seen here, NGC 5195; it would be to the Whirlpool’s
left. As NGC 5195 slides by, its gravity tugs at the Whirlpool's spiral arms,
promoting star formation. The darker areas are gas and dust; the brightest
areas are hot young blue-white stars, and the reddish areas are older star-forming
regions. The Whirlpool is visible through binoculars, although it takes at
least an 8-inch telescope and excellent conditions to start to see the spiral
form. Look about 3.5 degrees southwest of the end star of the Big Dipper's
handle. (The width of your three middle fingertips held together at arm’s
length is 5 degrees.)
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Star-forming region, Nebula RCW 49,
acrylic on canvas, 20 x 20. $600.00
Copyright Jodie Tighe, all rights reserved.
Copyright Jodie Tighe, all rights reserved.
Like the Trapezium Cluster in the Orion Nebula, this
is a womb where stars are being born, and it even looks a bit like a womb. It's
about 14,000 light-years away in the constellation Centaurus, measures 350
light-years across, and contains more than 2,200 stars. In the dust clouds,
astronomers have seen about 300 newborn stars, some with protoplanetary discs.
The blue-white supergiants in the middle have burned away the dust clouds from
which they themselves were formed.
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Omega Centauri (NGC 5139), acrylic on
panel, 11 x 14. $300.00
Copyright Jodie Tighe, all rights reserved.
Copyright Jodie Tighe, all rights reserved.
This globular cluster is the biggest in the Milky Way
Galaxy, containing as much matter as 5 million suns. Located in the
constellation Centaurus, it is visible to the naked eye as a fuzzy 4th
magnitude "star", low on the southern horizon (36 degrees south of
the star Spica in the constellation Virgo) on spring and summer evenings. A
good telescope won't give you this kind of color, but you can probably still
pick out some blues. Omega Centauri measures about 150 light-years across and,
at the center, the stars are packed in at an average distance from one another
of about 1/10th of a light-year.
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The Boomerang Nebula, acrylic on
canvas, 20 x 20. $600.00.
Copyright Jodie Tighe, all rights reserved.
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The Mice, NGC 4676 A and B, acrylic
on canvas, 30 x 40. NFS.
Copyright Jodie Tighe.
Two spiral galaxies in the midst of a cosmic
collision, the Mice lie about 300 million light-years from us in the
constellation Coma Berenices. Computer simulations suggest we may be seeing the
galaxies about 160 million years after their latest collision. The difference
between the gravitational pulls from one another's near and far portions create
their "tails" of stars and dust. The galaxies will continue to
collide over and over again until, eventually, gravity will coalesce them into
one huge elliptical galaxy.
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The Sombrero Galaxy (M104, NGC 4594),
acrylic on canvas, 24 x 48. NFS.
Copyright Jodie Tighe.
In the constellation Virgo, lying 11.5 degrees
visually west of the star Spica (the brightest star in Virgo), the Sombrero Galaxy
is a spiral galaxy that we see closer to edge-on than face-on. At a distance of
about 29 million light-years from us, the Sombrero has a glowing nucleus
surrounded by a prominent dust lane. It can be seen with binoculars, an 8 inch
telescope is needed to tell the central bulge apart from the disc, and the dust
lane becomes visible with a 10-12 inch telescope.
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NGC 1850, a double star cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud, acrylic on
panel, 12 x 16. Copyright Jodie Tighe. $300.00
This double star cluster, containing
a large cluster of stars about 50 million years old and a small cluster with
even younger, 4 million year old stars, is an oddity. The cluster looks very
similar to the galactic clusters we see roaming the halo of our Milky Way. However,
none of those clusters contain young stars. The floating blue nebula on the
left of the painting testifies to violent
stellar explosions called supernovae, indicating short-lived massive stars were also once present in NGC 1850. The cluster is located in the Large
Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way, and the
gravitational interactions between the two galaxies may be responsible for this
unusual formation.
Image to be uploaded.
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Veil Nebula (Cygnus Loop), acrylic on canvas, 18 x 36. $725.00
This supernova remnant is from a star that exploded
between 5 and 8 thousand years ago. It lies in the constellation Cygnus, at a
distance of about 1,400 light-years. This structure is so large in the sky that
early astronomers did not realize it was one big object, and so they gave its
parts several different names. The “Western Veil” is NGC 6960
(also called the "Witch's Broom") and is near the foreground star 52
Cygni; the “Eastern Veil”, whose
brightest area is NGC 6992,
trails off farther south into NGC 6995
and IC 1340; and Pickering's Triangle is brightest at
the north central edge of the loop. NGC
6974 and NGC 6979 are
luminous knots in a fainter patch of nebulosity on the northern rim between NGC
6992 and Pickering's Triangle. (So many names and numbers – let's just call it
The Veil!)
Image to be uploaded.
