SOAR
Telescope
Photo
Gallery
newCSCEbox.jpg
The 4.1m diameter SOAR Telescope is
located at 9000’ altitude on Cerro
Pachón mountain, in Chile.
These pictures (and more) are available on the web at
ftp://ftp.pa.msu.edu/pub/baldwin/soarpics/
The file names are given under each picture.
(Dec 2005)
The original PowerPoint version of this 3-page
document can be found there as SOAR_pictures.ppt
All of the photos (except for SOAR_room_big) should be
attributed to:
Copyright SOAR Corporation, Inc, all rights reserved.
The Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope is a
joint project of: Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas
Científicas e Tecnológicas CNPq-Brazil, The University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Michigan State
University, and the National Optical Astronomy
Observatory.
telescope3.jpg
telescope3.tif
NGC 4622
We encourage the use of these pictures for any purpose
beneficial to MSU. For more info, contact Jack Baldwin
(517-355-9200 x2411, baldwin@pa.msu.edu).
telescope4.jpg
telescope4.tif
SOAR_Horizontal_1034.tif
(this picture benefits from playing with the
contrast and brightness a bit)
SOAR_room_big.jpg
SOAR can be used remotely from a
Remote Observing Room in the BPS
building on the MSU campus.
(Photo credit: Aaron LaCluyzé, MSU.)
SOAR_Ariel_0056.tif
M83.jpg
M83box3.jpg
M83nucl.jpg
M83small.jpg
M83 is a spiral galaxy located 15 million
light years away from us in the
constellation of Hydra. The blue knots in
the spiral arms are groups and clusters
of recently formed, very hot stars.
NGC4622.jpg
NGC4622[1].tiff
The spiral galaxy NGC 4622 is located at a
distance of about 100 million light-years, in the
constellation of Centaurus. It exhibits extremely
thin and smooth outer spiral arms, traced by
young blue stars. It was recently discovered, by
ground based plus Hubble Space Telescope
observations, that the outer arms of NGC 4622
point toward the direction of the galaxy's
clockwise rotation, while the inner arms point in
the opposite direction. The unique rotational
configuration of its spiral arms may be the result
of a collision with a smaller companion galaxy in
the past. This image covers an area on the sky of
1.9 x 1.9 arcminutes.
30Doradus.jpg
30 Doradus is a region where stars are forming
from a huge interstellar gas cloud. The dark
vertical stripe through the center of the picture
is the gap between the two CCD detectors
used in SOAR’s optical Imager. The white
clumping of stars next to that gap is a recentlyformed cluster of stars, whose light is now
illuminating the surrounding gas.
Color image constructed by Aaron LaCluyzé, MSU.
NGC3961.jpg
The globular cluster NGC3961 is
made up of about 100,000 stars
that orbit about their common
center of mass. It is one of about
120 such clusters that are some
of the very oldest objects in our
own Galaxy, dating back to the
galaxy’s formation some 13 billion
years ago.
n3603_final.jpg
n3603_final.tiff
NGC 3603 is the largest star-forming region in our
own Milky Way Galaxy. The central portion of a dense
interstellar cloud of a molecular gas has fragmented to
form stars that are now illuminating and evaporating
away the surrounding gas cloud. This picture
represents MSU’s first real science data taken with the
SOAR Telescope. It combines red light emitted by
hydrogen gas, green light from oxygen that is mixed in
with the hydrogen, and blue light emitted by stars.
Color image constructed by Eric Pellegrini, MSU.
NGC2440_composite_crop.jpg
NGC 2440 is a “planetary
nebula”, a series of shells and
rings of gas that have been
expelled from a dying central star
(which is barely visible as a faint
blue dot at the center of the
nebula). This will be the fate of
our own Sun, 5 billion years
from now.