1 2 CCD CAMERA

Softly glowing filaments stream from a complex of hot young stars. This image of a nebula, known as N44C, comes from the archives of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST). It was taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in 1996 and is being presented by the Hubble Heritage Project.

N44C is the designation for a region of glowing hydrogen gas surrounding an association of young stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby, small companion galaxy to the Milky Way visible from the Southern Hemisphere.

N44C is peculiar because the star mainly responsible for illuminating the nebula is unusually hot. The most massive stars, ranging from 10-50 times more massive than the Sun, have maximum temperatures of 54,000 to 90,000 degrees Fahrenheit (30,000 to 50,000 degrees Kelvin). The star illuminating N44C appears to be significantly hotter, with a temperature of about 135,000 degrees Fahrenheit (75,000 degrees Kelvin)!

Ideas proposed to explain this unusually high temperature include the possibility of a neutron star or black hole that intermittently produces X-rays but is now "switched off."

On the top right of this Hubble image is a network of nebulous filaments that inspired comparison to Botticelli. The filaments surround a Wolf-Rayet star, another kind of rare star characterized by an exceptionally vigorous "wind" of charged particles. The shock of the wind colliding with the surrounding gas causes the gas to glow.

N44C is part of the larger N44 complex, which includes young, hot, massive stars, nebulae, and a "superbubble" blown out by multiple supernova explosions. Part of the superbubble is seen in red at the very bottom left of the HST image.

The data were taken in November 1996 with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 by Donald Garnett (University of Arizona) and collaborators and stored in the Hubble archive. The image was composed by the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA).

Object Name: N44C

Image Type: Astronomical

Image Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Acknowledgment: D. Garnett (University of Arizona)

text from HubbleSite.org

It's a strange thing to look right into a vent that is emitting a live flow of molten, glowing lava with a temperature of about 1100° C (close to 2000 degrees Fahrenheit). Te heat is nearly unbearable. Along with the river of molten rock come gases that are not exactly healthy, neither for human beings nor for their cameras. But the temptation to get as close as possible, and take photos as spectacular as possible, is there each time that Mount Etna volcano in Sicily erupts, and it erupts quite frequently.

One of the nicest eruptions to be observed and photographed was the 9-months-long emission of lava from small vents at the base of the Southeast Crater cone, near the summit of Etna in 1999. It started on 4 February and continued until mid-November; the lava flow was easily accessible because it issued not far from the point where hundreds to thousands of tourists are brought in 4WD buses every day. Still, during its early phases, this eruption was seen by relatively few people (in comparison with the endless procession of visitors during the high tourist season).

Lava rapidly formed a network of subterranean tubes, from which it would issue through ever-shifting secondary vents, called "ephemeral". This is one of those ephemeral vents, which had formed just a short time before I took this photograph. Lava was issuing relatively slowly, at a rate of a couple of centimeters per second. The whole width of this photo is possibly 1 m (about 3 feet). It does look BIG, though, doesn't it?

Photo taken 7 April 1999 and scanned from original Ektachrome slide

ADDENDUM 22 OCTOBER 2010, 18.30 h (local time) - we've just had another explosive ash emission from the western vent of the Bocca Nuova, nearly identical to a number of earlier events from the same vent, most recently on 7 October.