The Hand of God

With Easter coming up and all sorts of religiosity going on, here are a couple of heavenly photos from space. The first, looking spookily like a hand, comes from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. At the centre of this image is a very young and powerful pulsar, known as PSR B1509-58. The pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star which is spewing out energy to create the shapes we see in this photo, including the one that resembles a large blue hand. In this image, the lowest energy X-rays are red, the medium range is green, and the most energetic are blue. The pulsar is only around 20 kilometres in diameter but the nebula spans 150 light years. For more amazing photos from Chandra, check out their flickr gallery. This image came out on April 3 2009.


The second is one you may have seen before - perhaps in a spam email. It has been dubbed The Eye of God and was featured on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day in 2003. It is the Helix Nebula, which is a planetary nebula created at the end of the life of a Sun-like star. Gasses are expelled into space to make it look like we are looking down a helix. The remaining core glows so much so that it causes the previously expelled gas to fluoresce. It seems God has blue eyes and a lot of redness around the outside, suggesting he stayed out a little too long the previous night.

One of these days someone should put together all these images so we can finally find out what He looks like. Looking forward to someone spotting the beard in space one day...