The AstroSat Picture of the Month for March 2019 is the Globular Cluster NGC 5466 and one of its stars NH 84. On the top left is the ultraviolet image of cluster, with its Blue Straggler Star NH 84 (circled in green) that lives in its outskirts. A zoomed-in image of the cluster is on […]
The AstroSat Picture of the Month for February 2019 is an Ultraviolet image of the globular cluster NGC 2808, with far-ultraviolet shown in blue and near-ultraviolet in yellow. Stars emitting in both are seen in white. The red and light-blue circles show the locations of two populations of faint red-horizontal branch stars identified using UVIT-AstroSat. […]
The AstroSat Picture of the Month for January 2019 shows the 97 minute long orbit of AstroSat around the Earth. This orbit is roughly equatorial (top right), inclined at around 6 degrees to it (top left). This results in each orbit being slightly displaced from the previous one (bottom). Picture credit: Leo Jackson John, Operation […]
The AstroSat Picture of the Month for December 2018 presents the Ultra Violet Imaging Telescope itself. A schematic of the design of the UVIT is shown on the top left, and a photograph of the two UVIT telescopes is in the top right. An image of the fully assembled UVIT, containing both telescopes sitting snugly […]
The AstroSat Picture of the Month for November 2018 presents false colour image of the Globular Cluster NGC 288 in the ultraviolet taken by UVIT. The near-UV emission the stars are in yellow and the far-UV emission is in white. It is clear that the UVIT image shows only the hot stars as the cooler […]
The AstroSat Picture of the Month for October 2018 presents the false-color ultraviolet images of NGC6302 (Butterfly Nebula) using ASTROSAT. On the left is a cartoon showing the full extent of the nebula with far-ultraviolet represented in blue. The picture on the right shows the zoomed-in view of the brightest part of the butterfly shaped […]
The AstroSat Picture of the Month for September 2018 is a photograph of AstroSat itself. The top panel has two photographs of the fully assembled AstroSat. The bottom panel is an artists’s conception of the observatory in space. Can you identify each of the five telescopes in the top panel photographs? Pic Credit: Top panel […]
The AstroSat Picture of the Month for August 2018 is an X-ray image of the Tycho Supernova Remnant in the 0.8-2.0 nanometres (0.6-1.6 keV) range, made by the Soft X-ray Telescope on board AstroSat. The supernova remnant is roughly 8 arcminutes big (3.7 times smaller than the full moon in the sky) and the emission […]
The AstroSat Picture of the Month for July 2018 is an image of the central part of the merging galaxy NGC 7252. This image has been obtained by dividing the NUV by the FUV image, pixel by pixel, indicating ‘ultraviolet colour’. The outer redder parts are where the stars older than 400 million years are, […]
The AstroSat Picture of the Month for June 2018 is the ultraviolet image of the merging galaxy cluster Abell 2256, more than 800 million light years away. This cluster contains galaxies spread over a large area, and we have zoomed in on six of these galaxies to show you their ultraviolet images. The brightest objects […]